The Atlantic: Biden’s Gaffes Are Not What You Think | Diane Ravitch’s blog

Yair Rosenberg, a staff writer for The Atlantic, puts Biden’s latest gaffe into context.

On Sunday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson went on television and mixed up Iran and Israel. “We passed the support for Iran many months ago,” he told Meet the Press, erroneously referring to an aid package for the Jewish state. Last night, the Fox News prime-time host Jesse Watters introduced South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as hailing from South Carolina. I once joined a cable-news panel where one of the participants kept confusing then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions with Representative Pete Sessions of Texas. I don’t hold these errors against anyone, as they are some of the most common miscues made by people who talk for a living—and I’m sure my time will come.

Yesterday, President Joe Biden added another example to this list. In response to a question about Gaza, he referred to the Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as the president of Mexico. The substance of Biden’s answer was perfectly cogent. The off-the-cuff response included geographic and policy details not just about Egypt, but about multiple Middle Eastern players that most Americans probably couldn’t even name. The president clearly knew whom and what he was talking about; he just slipped up the same way Johnson and so many others have. But the flub could not have come at a worse time. Because the press conference had been called to respond to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents, which dubbed the president an “elderly man with a poor memory,” the Mexico gaffe was immediately cast by critics as confirmation of Biden’s cognitive collapse.

But the truth is, mistakes like these are nothing new for Biden, who has been mixing up names and places for his entire political career. Back in 2008, he infamously introduced his running mate as “the next president of the United States, Barack America.” At the time, Biden’s well-known propensity for bizarre tangents, ahistorical riffs, and malapropisms compelled Slate to publish an entire column explaining “why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” The article included such gems as the time that then-Senator Biden told the journalist Katie Couric that “when the markets crashed in 1929, ‘Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, “Look, here’s what happened.”’” The only problem with this story, Slatelaconically noted, was that “FDR wasn’t president then, nor did television exist.”

In other words, even a cursory history of Biden’s bungling shows that he is the same person he has always been, just older and slower—a gaffe-prone, middling public speaker with above-average emotional intelligence and an instinct for legislative horse-trading. This is why Biden’s signature moments as a politician have been not set-piece speeches, but off-the-cuff encounters, such as when he knelt to engage elderly Holocaust survivors in Israel so they would not have to stand, and when he befriended a security guard in an elevator at The New York Times on his way to a meeting with the paper’s editorial board, which declined to endorse him. And it’s why Biden’s key accomplishments—such as the landmark climate-change provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s first gun-control bill in decades, and the expected expansion of the child tax credit—have come through Congress. The president’s strength is not orating, but legislating; not inspiring a crowd, but connecting with individuals… 

Source: The Atlantic: Biden’s Gaffes Are Not What You Think | Diane Ravitch’s blog

Incandescent soul…by Mágica Mistura – Mágica Mistura

You know when your soul

Do you feel the heat of the entire universe?

For a while you can forget…

Forget the madness that seems to rise…

Like a wall of selfishness, of lack of empathy

Forgetting that people seem to move around the Earth with the simple aim of breathing hatred, lies, foolishness…

Even when the path of love and acceptance is so much more beautiful, easier and nobler

Let us therefore continue, firm in the certainty that our spark of hope

Shall illuminate in incandescent Light

The entire Earth, the entire Universe…

In a wonderful mix of joy and peace

✨️Mágica Mistura

Source: Incandescent soul…by Mágica Mistura – Mágica Mistura

Garment – Kaushal Kishore

 

Humans, with minds so keen,

Don clothes to remain unseen…

Yet language, a garment so fine,

If not worn with finesse, reveals the design…

*

In attire so costly, adorned they may be,

But words laid bare expose humanity…

Intelligence, a precious gift they hold,

Yet language is the cloth, both warm and bold…

*

–Kaushal Kishore 

Source: Garment – Kaushal Kishore

Happy Lunar New Year: 2024 is The Year of the Dragon 🐉 | From Behind the Pen

Image Credit: Dương Nhân

Commonly known as the Spring Festival in China, the Lunar New Year is a fifteen-day celebration marked by many traditions. At home, families decorate windows with red paper cuttings and adorn doors with couplets expressing auspicious wishes for the new year. Shopping for holiday sundries in open-air markets and cleaning the house are also beloved traditions. The Lunar New Year’s Eve reunion dinner is the highlight that kicks off the holiday, a feast with a spread of symbolic dishes, such as a whole fish representing abundance, that bring good luck and fortune. The fifteenth and final day of the holiday is the Lantern Festival, during which people have tangyuan, or sweet glutinous rice balls, and children carry lanterns around the neighborhood at night to mark the end of the celebration. (Reference: Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Arts, https://asia.si.edu/whats-on/events/celebrations/lunar-new-year-celebration/)

Image Credit: Angga Ferdinand 

Source: Happy Lunar New Year: 2024 is The Year of the Dragon 🐉 | From Behind the Pen