President Joe Biden went to New Jersey to survey the impact of Hurricane Ida. Then he went on television to embarrass himself.
On Sept. 7, he remarked on the damage from the hurricane… and in an apparent moment of confusion, he said that tornadoes aren’t called tornadoes anymore.
According to a transcript by the White House, he said:
And so, we’re all in this together, and we’ve got to — we’ve got to make sure that we don’t leave any community behind. And it’s all across the country. Uh, you know, the members of Congress know from their colleagues in Congress that, you know, the — what looks like a tornado — they don’t call them that anymore — that hit the crops and wetlands in the middle of the country, in Iowa, in Nevada, and — I mean, it’s just across the board. And uh, you know, um, as I said, we’re in this together.
Notably, the transcript also omitted all Biden’s fillers, like “um” and “uh.” It remains unclear whether Biden was talking about the state of Nevada or the city of Nevada, Iowa.
Fox News Senior Meteorologist Janice Dean suspects that Biden was confusing tornadoes with derechos.
A derecho is not simply a tornado by a different name. A derecho is an altogether different type of windstorm, although derechos can sometimes cause tornadoes.
The Nevada thing threw me off as well. Ok. I’m done.
— Janice Dean (@JaniceDean) September 7, 2021
The president also used this tragic opportunity to push his agenda for more government spending.
He even used his slogan, “Build back better.”
“I want to begin by thanking Senator Booker for all the work he’s doing in the Senate trying to get this infrastructure and other — the things we have to do to not just build back, but build back better than it was before,” he said, referring to U.S. Sen. Corey Booker (D–N.J.)
Biden’s defenders are attributing all his baffling comments to a stutter. Biden has often said that he has a clinical stutter. He wrote about a stutter in a 2009 letter addressed to the chair of the National Stuttering Association.
Granted, sometimes people with speech impediments can feel themselves starting to stutter on a certain word, and so they switch to an alternate word mid-sentence. This technique, called “circumlocution,” can mangle the grammar of a sentence.
However, the issue with Biden’s recent speech with the content of the sentence, not the grammar or the word choice.
Despite what the Democrat loyalists would have you believe, Biden’s speech was confusing and confused.
Just like the president himself.
The Horn editorial team