Obama encounters Boston sports fans, Rand Paul on the Supreme Court: The dumbest political quotes of the week
Each week, the Daily Caller picks the dumbest political statements and ranks them (just for Yahoo! readers) on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being the worst). Who do you think said the dumbest thing? Vote in our poll below!
After all the years President Barack Obama spent at Harvard, you would think he would know better than to antagonize a Boston sports fan, let alone a large group of them.
Apparently, he must have forgotten about the town’s temperament, because at a Monday night fundraiser, the president was lucky the Secret Service had his back after he took a stab at humor during his closing remarks:
"Finally, Boston I just want to say -- thank-you for Youkilis," he said, referring to the former Red Sox player, Kevin Youkilis, who was traded to Obama’s hometown team, the Chicago White Sox.
The crowd erupted in boos, and if he had been anyone other than the leader of the free world, things could have ended much, much worse. Has he never seen “The Departed”? Those people don’t mess around.
Cringe Factor: 2/5
***
During the collective media freak out Thursday over the Supreme Court’s ruling of the constitutionality of Obama’s health care law, a few news outlets got a little trigger happy in an attempt to beat competitors and break the news first.
Fox News wrongly reported that the individual mandate had been deemed unconstitutional, and a headline across the screen flashed the news, but anchor Bill Hemmer quickly backtracked his statement saying, “Let me stop you right there — because this is complicated…We’re still trying to figure this out. Be cautious with us, and we are trying to do the best we can as we sort through it.”
But the worst offender came from former cable news giant CNN, which reported the incorrect decision from not one, not two, but from three different reporters, two Twitter accounts, and one giant headline on its website that read: “Mandate struck down.”
The lower-third box on CNN’s cable channel carried the incorrect headline for six whole minutes before it was changed to read that the Supreme Court had, in fact, upheld the law.
In this case, slow and steady wins the race.
Cringe Factor: 5/5
***
After the Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday, Republican Congress members flocked in droves towards media outlets in order to get their two-cents worth in.
Most of the statements and interviews were relatively similar; most GOP congressmen were “disappointed” or even “sad” about the ruling.
But Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul had quite a different take on the matter:
“Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be ‘constitutional’ does not make it so. The whole thing remains unconstitutional,” Paul said in a statement.
Sure, a couple of people declaring something constitutional doesn’t make it constitutional. But five Supreme Court justices declaring something constitutional does, actually, make it constitutional.
Cringe Factor: 4/5
