fuster-cluck

[Victor Steinbok]

Pulled the trigger too soon.

7.    Bartergate
8.    flood the mind

     VS-)

On 4/23/2010 5:35 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
> 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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