“US president Barack Obama held an important press conference at the White House today, where he discussed extremely serious topics such as the crimes of ISIS and Russia’s recalcitrant actions in Ukraine.
Nobody listened, because everyone was distracted by Mr Obama’s suit.”
So begins an article from the Herald Sun, a Melbourne, Australia-based newspaper. This super nothing burger of an incident was sufficiently (if inexplicably) newsworthy to merit an entry at Wikipedia under the key words “Obama tan suit controversy.” In the body of the entry, then-Rep. Peter King is quoted as saying, “There’s no way, I don’t think, any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday. I mean, you have the world watching.”
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
If there was a lesson in any of this — and there wasn’t — it was don’t wear a tan suit if your president.
Regardless, Joe Biden would have done well yesterday to heed that admonition. He didn’t, and he suffered two flubs in the space of a few minutes. In the first, he invented a word: vaxation.
It’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated. I know I’ve said it constantly and others have as well. The vaxation of the unvaccinated. And it’s needless — taking a needless toll on our country. [Emphasis added]
In the hands of a more-skilled or at least more cognitively sound orator, the word might actually have come off as a portmanteau of vaccine and vexation. Instead, we had Joe being Joe once again.
His second slip was likely one of misreading. According to the CDC, 189.9 million Americans have received at least one dose of vaccine, and 163.9 million have now been fully vaccinated. It’s unclear where Biden got the number, but he read, “You know, we have roughly 350 million people vaccinated in the United States and billions around the world.” Watch:
According to the Census Bureau, the current population of the U.S. is 328 million. If every single person living in the country had been vaccinated, there’s no way that 350 million people could have taken the jab.
Misstatements like these cause real vaxation.
