Texas TV reporter Brad Watson caught President Obama making misleading statements, and then getting snippy about it. Obama’s bullying remark at the end of the short interview is why the video went viral, and that’s what public attention — reasonably enough — has focused on.
But if you pay attention to the beginning of the video clip, just after Obama finishes adjusting his shirt cuffs and starts expounding on budget issues, there’s a blooper that deserves attention all by itself. Watson, in his writeup, was kind enough to Obama to edit out Obama’s slip with the numbers. But Obama began by talking about the dollar cuts put forward by his fiscal commission. The number he first gave was “2 million,” before he caught himself and corrected that to say “2 trillion.”
OK, we all make mistakes (assuming it was a mistake, and not an accidental flash of some hidden agenda). But rarely are they on that order of magnitude. Even if Obama was talking about cuts, rather than the vastly larger, multiple trillions now involved in his plans for spending other people’s money, there’s something disquieting about a president who can so cavalierly confuse millions of dollars with trillions.
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