PrintDecember 24, 2007
Chris Matthews' Alternate Universe
Dispatch from the people who live in glass houses front -- during his annual "let's laugh at this year's gaffes" fest, Chris Matthews ultimately managed to out-gaffe the competition.
On yesterday's show, Chris and friends had a blast dissecting the year's best and worst political moments, particularly in the form of side-splitting verbal howlers. From Rudy's acceptance of his wife's phone call while addressing the NRA to Romney's use of the word "varmints" in describing his hunting prey to Alberto Gonzales's numerous recollection problems, Republicans appeared quite the laughing-stock.
Not surprisingly, Matthews himself offered as the year's best one-liner "the time President Bush was praising his education program for ‘childrens,' with an S." The smug host was referring, of course, to the president's September speech to New York educators in which he said:
"As yesterday's positive report card shows, childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured."
A genuinely funny moment, indeed, Chris: A grammatical error made during a speech about education. Oh, the irony.
Yet, in the previous segment, Matthews had played the October 30th clip of Dennis Kucinich responding affirmatively to Tim Russert's question, "Now, did you see a UFO?" The host felt it necessary to allay any doubts that the Dems' strangest candidate wannabe was talking close encounters by adding:
"And just to clarify this, there's a difference between saying some--seeing some cloud formation you don't quite understand or something in the sky that doesn't make sense and saying you saw an unidentified flying object, because that suggests...you do believe it's coming from some other universe." [emphasis mine]
Now, some other solar system or even some other galaxy might have made sense. But "universe" is a term used to describe literally all that exists. Answers.com offers a fairly serviceable definition:
"All matter and energy, including the earth, the galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space, regarded as a whole."
Needless to say, then, there can exist but one universe.
So what's more laughable, Chris - inadvertently adding an "s" to a word's already plural form or not knowing that the word universe has no plural form?
