| I have listened to him in various contexts. He does not make a gaffe every other sentence. He does not make a gaffe every ten sentences. He does not always make a gaffe in the course of an interview, and when he does, it is often a slight stumble, like a mispronunciation or mangled syntax. It is true, one can collect some egregious examples of mangling, but they are not common to his discourse. A lot of what you quote is trivial, a lack of agreement in number ("families is") or a reversal of terms ("wings take dream"), and are likely a result of tiredness. The few quotes available to you that might be viewed with alarm are generally poor expressions of an idea that is in itself sound. For example, in the comment about social security, he means that they don't want to allow privatization because they want to keep complete control over it, like it is a welfare program, not a pension plan. He probably left out a term like "welfare". In the residual cases, I detect a sign of exhaustion I have myself experienced, if more rarely: I start to say something, and I am so tired I forget what I intended to say. All of this is a consequence of campaigning, and not being terribly glib to begin with. It is less than nothing....... |
