10 Thousand Dead In Kansas

"In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed," Barack Obama said in a speech at a Richmond art studio.

WOW, that is a lot of dead Kansans ... especially from a town of 1800 people!!!

Of course, we know, he just "made a mistake", so only a story for the right wing nuts, no national story at all. As I've said before, I tend to agree with this ... we know that something like misspelling potato would never be a national story that would damage a candidate. Oh, oops, I mean damage a DEMOCRAT. It would never harm a DEMOCRAT!

Seriously, I do tend to think that the general treatment of Democrats in the press is "closer to correct" on this kind of story. I think it is "a bit weak" in cases like William Jefferson, the sitting Democrat Congressman caught with $90K of cold cash in his freezer when his party runs on "rooting out corruption", but I guess that just shows that I foolishly think the press is biased.

On the other hand. I've been known to get mixed up on Giga vs Mega when it comes to storage measures, but to be off by THREE orders of magnitude on LIVES? Isn't that just a BIT odd? I mean if you say "10 THOUSAND" dead when the real number is TWELVE, that seems to be very much "out of touch with reality", doesn't it? 9-11 was 3K dead, yes, the Democrats fabricated a 10K death toll for New Orleans, but the Boston Globe and AP listed that total at 964. So if you are saying "10K dead", doesn't SOMETHING go through your mind that says "gee, that doesn't sound right"?

Leadership needs some common sense--you can't know everything, so you better be able to keep track of the big picture. I'd argue that minor spelling mistakes fall in the category of "don't care". I'd even argue that an actual speech impediment would be OK as long as the leader can communicate--how much is made by Bush's verbal gaffes that are just obvious word mixing with no problems on actual meaning? Quite a lot.

Again, he probably did just actually make some sort of "brain drop out mistake", but, aren't 3 orders of magnitude on LIVES an odd thing? Dollars, bytes, days ... lots of other things I can see being "way off on", but it just seems that the idea of 10K dead in Kansas from a storm would tell you that you have the wrong story.

I guess the message is the same as always ... "Be a Democrat, and you too can say whatever you want, have sex at the office, be filthy rich and still OK and just generally be popular".