If you go to this graphic from this weekend’s New York Times Week in Review, it shows a series of Kerry and Bush quotes from the debates and then text bubbles with humorous quips about what they were probably thinking when they made the given statement.
One of those from Kerry is this one: “And long before President Bush and I get a tax cutâand thatâs who gets itâlong before we do, Iâm going to invest in homeland security and Iâm going to make sure weâre not cutting cops programs in America and weâre fully staffed in our firehouses and that we protect the nuclear and chemical plants.”
The Times then suggested Kerry was thinking: “If I call officers ‘cops’ I sound like a regular guy.”
Actually, though, if you look at the published transcript of the debate it says not ‘cops’ but ‘COPS’. And that’s because anyone who comes even remotely close to following public policy knows that COPS is an acronym for Community Oriented Policing Services program, passed under Clinton (i.e., hundred thousand new cops, etc.)
I’m assuming there’ll soon be a little bubble over the Times writer’s head saying: “If I spent more time learning about public policy and less time with Dowdesque thumb-nail cultural criticism maybe I wouldn’t make such a fool of myself.”
Special thanks to reader MJ for the catch.
