Romney in New Orleans asks where the water came from

[Bernardo de La Paz]

57. You are building up the molehill on the side of the mountain

(on edit amplified remarks about the woman)

Sorry you didn't get Cliffordu. He was making fun of the person who would inevitably say both sides are similar and you stepped up in it.

That's exactly backwards. I'm saying Obama cares and Romney is heartless. They could not be more different.

All politicians make verbal slips. Everybody tries to read a little too much into them. When Obama said "you didn't build that", it did not reveal a hidden Marxist agenda like the T's and R's would like you to think it does. Similarly, when Romney inartfully asks about the root cause of the flooding inartfully, it doesn't reveal much.

What does reveal a lot is when Romney directly, clearly, unequivocally says disaster relief is immoral in a time of corporate-rescue government deficits.

Obama doesn't 'slip up' in the way that you infer and he didn't look at business leaders and tell them they didn't build their businesses he told them that they didn't build the bridges and the schools and everything else that is essential for their businesses to operate.

Agreed.

It only became a 'gaffe' when FOX news edited it out and took words out.

Nah. It was inartful wording. It is small potatoes compared to Romney plainly telling flood victims in 2011 that disaster relief is immoral.

Marshall McLuhan famously said that "The medium is the Message" and it expressed the fact that how you communicate actually communicates what you think.

Actually, he wrote "Massage", but your point is partly correct. It was more that the medium used has a much more dramatic effects on the message than commonly supposed. Radio is a hot medium and TV is a cold one. Radio requires the listener to build mental images and TV / YouTube spoon feeds the viewer.

Justice Powell and later Newt Gingrich took notes and established think tanks to develop language guides to frame issues. George Lakoff has striven to do the same for Democrats and Progressives, but doesn't get the attention he deserves.

Romney's continued odd ball way of communicating is not just a poor choice of words, it reflects an odd view of the world. He cannot empathize with what other people are dealing with in a real way and can only tell a poor woman to go home and make a phone call as a solution to her problems from Isaac.

Of course! But the OP doesn't talk about that and neither are we! You can suddenly introduce the woman now late in the discussion, but that only makes my point. What Romney said to the woman was direct and heartless. It is the kind of thing that needs to be highlighted. That is much more revealing.

The OP and this thread and the thread title and the picture and the article the picture captures are all about Romney's statement about the water. To explain to an undecided that his inartful question had a real question behind it but if you read between the lines you can detect a distance, a remove, that Romney has from the struggles of ordinary people, ... well that requires a lot of words and connecting the dots for the reader / listener.

You don't need to connect the dots for anybody when Romney says "disaster relief is immoral" but corporate relief is not, or when he tells a homeless victim to "go home".

There is no point on continuing on the issue but if you want to learn more about the inherent sybiotic quality of medium and message go here;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

Thank you, but I've seen McLuhan speak in the 70s and I read his books around the time they came out in the late sixties.

I will say that the fact that you think that there is any kind of similarity between President Obama and Romney on how they communicate their message

No. You could not have that more wrong. Obama cares and says it. Romney directly in plain speech communicates his heartlessness. Is that clear enough for you? Capiche?

leaves my brain vacant of an immediate response to send an approprate nuerological response to the vocabulary part of my brain there by accessing a number of words of the appropriate length that could be compiled into a sentence and that absence renders my ability to render a verbal response moot.

That means you are at a loss for words.

I am not, and neither is Obama.