Why can’t we just let sleeping zingers lie?
On Monday night, the third presidential debate was in Boca Raton — a city known for being the host of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks.
Now that social media is a lot more popular, or something, than it was during the 2008 election, jokes and remarks are more likely to get repeated and blown out of proportion.
Luckily for us, these debates allow voters to see who the candidates really are; they also show us how the candidates would act in a verbal fight in front of friends, family and millions of Americans.
What’s the difference between a gaffe and a zing? We all know that Romney practiced many “zingers” for the first debate, but those quippy comments may have been more relevant in the second and third debates.
Romney’s “binders full of women” remark was offensive and weird and terrible, and it’s basically all we remember from that debate. How can someone so out of touch with how people want to be treated expect to win the respect of millions of voters? The memorable moment from the last presidential debate came from our very own President Obama.
“You mentioned the Navy, for example — that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916,” Obama said during the debate, “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land … we have ships that go underwater — nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of ‘Battleship,’ where we’re counting ships.”
This hilarious statement offended people like Dan Riker, who is from a military surplus outlet, Bayonet Inc. in Georgia.
“[Bayonets] are still distributed to the military all the time,” Riker said in a TMZ article. “He should get educated on it.”
The president obviously didn’t mean to offend a minority of our population with his remark. If Romney thinks the president is scaling down the military, then Obama was trying to explain how the military’s needs have changed. And don’t worry, because horses are still being used, too.
“Horse-mounted U.S. commandos played a pivotal role in the toppling of the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan in 2001,” said Peter Grier, a writer for the Christian Science Monitor.
People took Obama’s statement seriously so quickly. And while, yeah, he’s our leader, so we should take what he says seriously, he’s also a human being. He’s allowed to be flippant and awesome. The difference between “horses and bayonets” and “binders full of women” is the tone.
Obama didn’t try to undermine the use those weapons once had, but Romney couldn’t understand that human beings don’t appreciate being compartmentalized.
Everybody seems to focus on the words Obama said instead of the idea and intent behind them. His intent was to counteract what Romney tried to characterize as a bad military decision.
Just chill out, everybody. Instead, focus on educating yourself before the election.
