I was watching “The Five” the other day on Fox, when a familiar punching bag led the “C” block — Kamala Harris. I enjoy “The Five” because I know Dana Perino and like her. Greg Gutfeld can be very funny and Geraldo, believe it or not, can be quite sensible. But it’s Fox after all, so liberal gaffes are often rolled out like empty bottles at a shooting range. Today it was Kamala’s turn. She had dropped one of her infamous “word salads” at a press conference following a meeting with the Jamaican prime minister. It was a doozy. Here’s what she said.
“For Jamaica, one of the issues that has been presented as an issue that is economic on the way it’s impact has been the pandemic. So to that end, we are announcing today also that we will assist Jamaica in Covid recovery, um, by assisting in terms of the recovery efforts in Jamaica that have been essential to I believe what is necessary to strengthen not only the issue of public health but also to the economy.”
Poor Kamala. She takes three times as many words that are needed, strung together in non-diagrammable ways, to make a simple point: “We are going to help Jamaica recover from the pandemic.” Other times, she gets philosophical, almost metaphysical, as she did after touring a local library with Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards.
“The governor and I, and we were all doing a tour of the library here, and talking about the significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it there is great significance to the passage of time in terms of what we need to do to lay these wires, what we need to do to create these jobs, and there is such great significance to the passage of time when we think about a day in the life of our children.”
Kamala’s ostensible goal during the trip to Louisiana was to promote the Administration’s infrastructure bill, particularly the expansion of high-speed internet access. So the rumination on the “significance of the passage of time” was sort of poetic, but it did detract from the fundamental message.
Here’s another example. MSNBC’s Craig Melvin asked her whether the Administration is ready to turn the page and take a new approach to Covid in the second year of the pandemic. “Is it time?” Melvin asked. Maybe, probably, said Kamala.
“It is time for us to do what we have been doing and that time is every day. Every day it is time for us to agree that there are things and tools that are available to us to slow this thing down. And so right now we know we still have a number of people that is in the millions, of Americans, who have not been vaccinated.”
It’s kind of cool the way she bent time in that first sentence. “It is time for us to do what we have been doing.” Can’t argue with that. “And that time is every day.” Indeed it is. Apparently, the editors at MSNBC don’t appreciate the value of a good tautology because when they posted a clip of the interview on YouTube, they cut the first two sentences of that response. Or maybe they just wanted to make Kamala sound better. Who am I to judge?
For the record, I’m not applauding when people pile on Kamala, or President Biden for that matter, because of “word salads,” malapropisms or other verbal gaffes. First of all, we’ve all done it. And when you’re a public figure, with cameras recording every utterance, it just doesn’t seem fair to call out every single strangled sentence. I’m not so sure the First Gentleman, Doug Emhoff, isn’t within his rights to pull a Will Smith and slap Fox’s Jesse Waters upside the head for the way he ridicules his wife’s gaffes so incessantly.
The other point I’d make in Kamala’s defense is that she’s an accomplished thespian compared to some who’ve come before her. George Herbert Walker Bush, for one, didn’t exactly wield the language with the precision of a Lincoln or a Churchill. In one of his speeches, he seemed to go off-the-cuff when he paraphrased lyrics from “Stand a Little Rain,” a song by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, to explain the economy: “If you want to see a rainbow, you’ve got to stand a little rain.” He then went on to call the band “The Nitty Ditty Nitty Gritty Great Bird.”
George Sr. really liked quoting popular songs to explain the economy. “If this age of miracles and wonders has taught us anything, it’s that if we can change the world, we can change America,” he said, inverting the proper order of America and the world while drawing on Paul Simon’s song, “Boy In the Bubble.”
Not to be outdone, his Vice President, Dan Quayle, threw verbal curveballs that nobody could see coming. This one was redolent of the kind of de facto logic that Kamala Harris likes to employ: "Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific,” Quayle said. “It is in the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here."
Again, can’t argue with that.
Quayle was no doubt very bright (he earned a law degree so I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt), but you couldn’t tell it from his language. Here are a few of his greatest hits.
"I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people."
"Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child."
"Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is."
Come to think of it, maybe he was channeling Gracie Allen or Prof. Irwin Corey. Better to consider that option than the fact that he was a heartbeat away from the Presidency.
But back to the Bushes. The gift of gab reached its apogee with George W. The way he manhandled words brought to mind a copy editor I worked with back in the old days, one of those people who thought her job was to hold the line between bad English and the end of civilization. “Does no one care anymore about the language?” she would occasionally scream as we neared deadline.
George W. was the Michael Jordan of misspeak. Here are some of his chestnuts.
“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”
“You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.”
“We ought to make the pie higher.”
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.” (Careful readers will note the allusion to a popular song, taking after the old man).
George W. was kind of sweet about all of it, laughing along the way. At least he was self-aware. At a White House Correspondents Dinner in 2001, he noted “ Now ladies and gentlemen, you have to admit that in my sentences I go where no man has gone before.”
Finally, there is the man who broke the mold. What Donald Trump did to the English language was a giant step backwards for mankind, whether it was a breach of decorum or grammar or logic. He did have a certain street patois that he exaggerated for effect, as if he were back in one of the boroughs shooting the shit over coffee on a Saturday morning. But for those of who yearn for the soaring verbal symphonies of Lincoln, Roosevelt or Reagan, Trump was like listening to a garage band that couldn’t even keep its guitars in tune. Here are some of the Trumpster’s greatest hits.
“This conversation (with Ukraine President Zelensky) was flawless, it was appropriate, it was perfect, it was nice, it was everything.”
“What you’re going to see, I predict, will be perhaps the biggest scandal in the history of our country. Political scandal. But I guess that’s the biggest because what’s more important than political when it comes to that?” (to which the interviewer replies, “What do you mean by that?”)
“I’ll tell you what, you have a lot of very, very bad people. And a lot of people say deep state. I don’t like to use the word deep state. I just say they’re really bad, sick people.”
“(The Washington Post) is a phony paper. We no longer have it in the White House. And we’ve saved a lot of money.”
“Well, that’s total nonsense. I do want always corruption, I say that to anybody.” Freudians, take note.
It was said of Churchill that he helped win WWII by weaponizing the English language. There is probably some truth to that. Words matter and when they are used well they matter a great deal. Kamala has some work to do in leveling up her rhetorical skills, true, but keep in mind that she comes from a long lineage of politicians for whom English is a second language. At the end of the day, we can all figure out what they’re trying to say, but it’s a painful process getting there.
I tried to diaphragm the sentences but…