The word of the year in politics and media is "gaffe," which is generally defined as a verbal slip up, a faux-pas, a blunder, or some other clumsy indiscretion. We've become so accustomed to looking for gaffes in our 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year election news cycle that we fail to dig more deeply into the real meaning of these gaffes. There are fumbles, slip ups, and faux-pas, and then there are troubling signs of incompetence. By lumping all these incidences of error into the neat package of "gaffe" we rob the semantic power of the real situation behind the words.
Are you more interested in attacking John McCain for his debate miss on the president of Pakistan, or his bumbling of SEC and FEC, or are you more interested in his apparent lack of understanding of Sunni and Shiite? Both are given equal weight in the tapestry of "gaffe-dom" that the issue of competence is virtually lost.
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