Perry's Latest Oops Moment: 'Kim Jong the Second'

Another week, another Rick Perry gaffe, this time concerning the big news item of the day, the death of Kim Jong-Il. What could Perry get so wrong about the late North Korean dictator, about whom it's hard to say anything controversial because nearly everyone in America agrees he's a Very Bad Man? His name. "In an email statement regarding the death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, Rick Perry mistakenly referred to the despot as Kim Jong the Second," reports Think Progress. (The posting on Perry's website has since been updated with the correct spelling.) We see what happened: some sans-serif news brief on his death tripped up a Perry PR person, as a upper-case I and a lower-case l next to one another can easily be mistaken for "II" -- i.e., "the Second." But Kim Jong-Il was a regular old tyrant, not a monarch, which is probably something a presidential candidate (or at least the team surrounding him) should know. But Perry has excelled at not knowing things during his presidential campaign. What's strange about this one is that the email incorrectly referenced the dictator's name three times, but correctly used "-Il" once. What's unfortunate is that the email was a purely perfunctory statement from Perry on the "death of vicious dictator" who we could have assumed disliked Kim Jong-Il like any other red-blooded American even if he never released a statement. We'd say that news of his gaffes is getting old, but we're going to miss them once Perry (now polling in fifth place nationally according to Real Clear Politics) is out of the race.