Strand of Names, 31st Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Castor): One year ago today, according to Facebook's Memories, I reposted a quote by the Stable Genius:
And the fake news they go, "he told this crazy story with electric." It's actually not crazy. It's sort of a smart story, right? Sort of like, you know, it's like the snake, it's a smart when you, you figure what you're leaving in, right? You're bringing it in the, you know, the snake, right? The snake and the snake. I tell that and they do the same thing. - June 23, 2004
I'll offer a quantum of sympathy here, as someone who has read transcripts of my expert testimony in environmental litigations. We all think we're speaking perfectly structured sentences all the time with correct grammar, but the humbling truth is that when we read back the carefully recorded, word-for-word transcript of our testimony, we discover that it's actually full of incomplete sentences hanging in mid-thought, interjections of "you know" and "like" and slang, and occasionally the wrong words, sometimes complete non sequiturs. When we read the questions and comments of the cross-examining attorneys, they're perfectly formed and articulate, because they're used to being transcribed and have considerable practice at structuring well-formed, perfect sentences on the fly.
I'll excuse a person for a "you know" or the occasional incomplete sentence, but a politician, certainly the President of the United States of America, should have had enough experience giving speeches and talking to the press not to utter the nonsensical word salad above. But that was a whole year ago. Certainly the Stable Genius has gotten better by now, right?
“I want to buy icebreakers, you are very good at icebreakers,” he said today in response to an unrelated question from Finland during a press conference at the NATO Summit in The Hague. ”You're the King of Icebreakers, you make ‘em good, really good, that particular country, and they know what they're doing."
"I actually made 'em an offer," he continued,
I didn't go to Congress, they'll try and impeach me for this, but there's an old, it's not old, it's fairly new, but it's used icebreaker, and I offered them about one third of what he asked for, but we're negotiating.
We need icebreakers in the US and if we can get some inexpensively, I'd like to do that actually. They'll fix it up, make it good. . . And so we're negotiating with them for about 15 different icebreakers, but one of them is available now. It's old and it's old. It's five, six years old now. We're trying to buy it. I'm trying to make a good deal. All I do, my whole life, that's all I do is make deals. Yeah."
Assuming he wasn't inebriated while speaking, the words suggest a shocking level of cognitive decline. But where is the Jake "I Dated Monica Lewinsky" Tapper coverage of the SG's senility, his garbled speech, his incoherent thought?
Just as alarming, during the same icebreaker conference, the SG admitted that he gave Iran permission to launch its missile attack on the US base in Qatar. “They said, ‘We're going to shoot them. Is 1 pm okay?’” he claimed. The fact the the U.S. Commander in Chief gave a foreign nation permission to launch missiles at one of our overseas bases should be reported much more widely in the news than the scant coverage it's getting.