fuster-cluck

[Victor Steinbok]

seems to be catching on...

You might have heard of the flap in Nevada where the Republican US
Senate candidate claimed that bartering could be an alternative to the
health-care reform. Incredulous bloggers immediately wondered if she
meant "bargain". More recently, a party organ suggested that she simply
meant "negotiate", which seems to endorse the "bargain" theory. But the
candidate doubled down on actual bartering, suggesting that chickens and
goats--among other things--can be traded for medical check-up. This
prompted one enterprising comedian to place an ad on craigslist,
offering to trade a chicken for a heart transplant. But aside from
barter/bargain confusion, this brought another linguistic issue or two.

http://bit.ly/9gqVaL
> Later in the afternoon, Ralston expounded on the
> fuster-cluck-cluck-cluck in his daily Flash e-newsletter:
>> I initially believed that when Senate hopeful Sue Lowden made her
>> infamous bartering proposal in Mesquite, what I last week referred to
>> as her macaca moment, that she meant to use the word “bargain.” That
>> is, you should bargain with your doctor if you can, get the best
>> price. That would have been relatively uncontroversial, and if she
>> had corrected herself, the story would have evaporated.
>> Instead, thanks to what is either her stubborn refusal to say she
>> used the wrong word or what amounts to campaign malpractice, the
>> drops have become a tsunami, threatening to drown out any other
>> campaign message. It has been astonishing to watch Lowden defend the
>> remarks on “Nevada Newsmakers” and then watch her campaign send out
>> missives trying to justify what she said. Indeed, Ben Smith of
>> POLITICO indicated he thought the background doc was a joke because
>> her defense is so ludicrous.
>> The analogies here also flood the mind: Remember when Gov. Richard
>> Bryan, a shoo-in for the U.S. Senate in 1988, brushed off a
>> snowballing issue about his use of a “private jet.” He went from 40
>> percentage points ahead in the polls to even and almost lost a U.S.
>> Senate race. And that was a fabricated issue; this one is real.
>> Or how about a simpler one for Team Lowden: When you are in a hole,
>> the cardinal rule is – stop digging.
>> The latest her campaign sent out is a CNN story from a year ago about
>> bartering, headlined: “Can’t afford health care? Barter for it”
>> But even the story works against the campaign that emailed it far and
>> wide because it points out how bartering can’t fill the gap and is
>> rarely used. And now, as she tries to assert herself above the other
>> 11 candidates, Lowden finds herself being ridiculed far and wide. And
>> the whole bartering proposition lends itself so easily to derision,
>> as Jay Leno and now the DSCC discovered.
>

If you're keeping score:

1. barter/bargain
2. fuster-cluck-cluck-cluck [buck fush]
3. macaca moment
4. campaign malpractice
5. the drops have become a tsunami
6. When you are in a hole, the cardinal rule is – stop digging.
[antedating candidate--how old is this, exactly?]

VS-)

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