Talk about “Democrats pounce!”
Last week, former President Donald J. Trump was riffing, as is his wont, during a speech in New Hampshire. Going off on the January 6 committee, aka. the Star Chamber, Trump said at one point, “Nikki Haley was in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guards, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that.”
Yes, he had just been talking about Nikki Haley, his main competition in the New Hampshire primary, and the needle got stuck. Trump kept saying “Nikki Haley” when he was referring to Nancy Pelosi.
This, obviously, means that Trump must be as close to dementia as Joe Biden, or so the Axis of Unethical Conduct is trying to spin it. “Mr. Trump, 77, often attacks President Biden, 81, over his age and suggests that Mr. Biden is mentally unfit for office, ” wrote the Times in reaction to the incident. “‘He can’t put two sentences together,’ Mr. Trump said on Friday. ‘Can’t put two sentences together. He needs a teleprompter.’ ” Yes, and that’s because Biden can’t put two sentences together, and is aging before our eyes like Indiana Jones’s nemesis in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade…
Biden won’t do press conferences, won’t debate, and is careful managed in his speaking appearances. Trump, who is also too old to be running for President again, still maintains a vigorous schedule and displays a degree of energy and engagement that we seldom see from the President. As Ethics Alarms pointed out when Barack Obama said he had visited “56 states” and was mocked by his critics afterwards, anyone who speaks in public frequently will make such gaffes, and it is dishonest as well as gratuitously nasty to pretend this is significant unless they do it habitually. You know, like Joe Biden.
I once was giving an ethics presentation in D.C. and got off on a tangent about the legal ethics of Perry Mason in the old classic TV show starring Raymond Burr. Afterwards, a lawyer in the audience asked me if I was aware that every time I meant to mentioned Raymond Burr, I said “Aaron Burr” instead. I had no idea; in fact, I went back and watched the video to see if I really had done that. Sure enough, I had. In another similar incident when I was in law school, my late, brilliant friend and house mate, Dennis Nollette, later to be a successful prosecutor in Seattle, was relating the embarrassing experience of a fellow classmate in a moot court competition he had watched. “The judge had Larry completely buffaloed,” Dennis said in his typically animated style. “He would think he had answered the buffalo’s question, but the buffalo hit him with another question right away, and Larry couldn’t satisfy the buffalo no matter what he said.”
After I stopped laughing, I said, “Do you realize you just repeatedly referred to the judge as a buffalo?” Dennis had shifted over from “judge” to “buffalo’ without even knowing it, and Dennis was just 23 at the time. That’s what Trump did. He had been talking about Nikki Haley, and didn’t even realize that he was using her name when he meant Nancy Pelosi. It meant nothing. ”He inexplicably substituted Nikki Haley’s name for Ms. Pelosi’s,” snarked the Times. It’s not inexplicable at all. Yet this was big news to NBC News, Raw Story, New York Magazine, The Messenger, The Daily Caller, KRDO, PoliticusUSA, Vanity Fair, Washington Examiner, Mother Jones, ABC News, The Hill, Politico and The Daily Beast.
Trump is never going to be treated fairly by the news media. He never has been, and he never will. This is a minor example, but still a telling one.
Ethics Alarms 
After reading this I just couldn’t help myself.
I went to ChatGPT and asked it to “write a poem about the loose cannon mouthed narcissist Donald Trump” and here is what I got back…
I wonder if ChatGPT plagiarized any of that poem?
I’ll not make it a habit to use ChatGPT.
Then I asked ChatGPT to “Write a poem about the predominant media favoring activist journalism over ethical journalism”.
Now, everyone can chime in on whether it was ethical for me to use ChatGPT in this way.
Hilarious.
I thought the one about journalism was reflective enough to share on Facebook.
I assume the bot is a better novelist than a poet. But its in good company: have you ever read any of Melville’s poems?
Yup read some of Melville’s poems, they’re not for me.
I see that Haley is trying to capitalize of that silly Trump gaffe. She is truly shameless, and I think everyone is finally figuring it out. Once, I confess, I had high hopes for Nikki…
As I wrote in my blog after their last debate, “I think [Haley] definitely has the intellectual potential to learn quickly”, “I like Nikki Haley but if she got the nomination I don’t think she can win.” Nikki Haley would be a better VP than Kamala Harris ever was or could be. I think Haley’s political asperations are likely done after this.
I hope so. Her campaign has revealed a lot of her unattractive qualities, and an inability to disguise them.
The Joe Biden account tweeted about it too.
“I don’t agree with Nikki Haley on everything, but we agree on this much: She is not Nancy Pelosi.”
“Top of mind” only excuses some of us, I guess.
It’s part of the “tip of the tongue” problem. Two names are filed together in your brain for various reasons. You reach for one, and get the other. This the Aaron/Raymond Burr event. Or the names are the same “shape”: both Haley and Pelosi have first and last names that end in the same “E” sounds with two syllable first names, and both are Trump adversaries.