Blogtrek

Caucuses, Gaffes and Lies

Well today is the big day. The Iowa caucuses meet tonight to decide on Iowa's choices for the Democratic candidate for President of the United States in the 2004 election. It looked like Dr. Howard Dean was going to win easily, but the contest has become close; it is close to a four-way tie.

Today I went to the Fox news site and found two video interviews by Fox news, one of Dean, and one of Iowa Senator Richard Gephardt. Gephardt said the usual stuff that I would expect of a Democratic candidate - doubting what Bush is doing and presenting Democratic agenda. So far, most of the candidates have been like that, making me indifferent between all of them as of late - all of them would be a much better President than Bush is. But when I listened to the Dean video I heard something that makes him stand out from the others.

When asked about the gaffes he has made recently, he said, "A gaffe in Washington is when somebody tells the truth and people in Washington don't think they should have." Interesting. If that's the case, then we want people who commit gaffes to be our next President, because we can trust that President to tell us the truth. In other words, statements made by Washington politicians are either gaffes or lies.

So I looked among the gaffes of Dean on the Internet and found this one from the Concord Monitor: "I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best … in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials." If this is a gaffe, then I want all the Democratic candidates to make gaffes all over the place. Our government is based on the principle that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty, and that this is a universal principle that holds for all defendants, including Osama. To me it is surprising that so many people hold this against Dean, so much that he took a partial retraction of it. Maybe people in this country don't want a democracy and a government of laws. All that Dean was stating was that the job of judging is given to the courts, not to the executive branch or especially the media.

Another one is where he said he wanted the support of men driving pickup trucks with Confederate flags on them. Again, I think this is what he should want. Not only should these men vote for Dean, but they should also replace those Confederate flags with US flags or with Earth flags.

In another one, he said that his brother was a POWMIA when actually he was an anti-war protestor who visited Laos and was never seen again. This is an easy mistake to make: he used an acronym. Acronyms are quite often incomprehensible, and even when they are comprehensible, they can easily become monsters, since they are divorced from the concept they came from. An example might be the password or the identification number that authorizes one to some service or benefit. These words seem plain enough and understandable. But when you replace them with ID number or PIN, you have created a monster. You tend to use PIN where you shouldn't or even when it does not make sense. I have heard many references to "PIN number", which means "personal identification number number", which shows that the user has forgotten what the acronym means. Dean apparently forgot what POWMIA means and used it to mean any missing person. If he had taken the trouble to spell it out, he would have started to say, "Prisoner of war or missing in action", and then would have noticed that it implied military service by his brother, and would not have made the remark. Don't use acronyms; it is the easiest way to be misunderstood.

But on the whole, I think that Dean's "gaffes" actually make him a better candidate. In light of his comment today, I say it makes him more truthful than the other candidates, and that is what we need in the government, the media and other places in our society today: the truth. I would rather have a President that makes gaffes instead of one that tells lies. So therefore I lean towards Dean for the Democratic candidate for President.