Please be kind I am new to this part of the forum, it feels funny.
No 10: Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) plays Mrs. Robinson with a college reporter.
The soon-to-be-former congresswoman made a name for herself as Florida's secretary of state during the controversial 2000 presidential election. Characterized by outlandish statements about religion, abrupt staff shakeups, tight-fitting shirts and questionable colors of eyeshadow, Harris was considered a longshot indeed in her (unsuccessful) bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson this year. But she never lost her campaign trail spirit--or her charm, as was evident when photographer Stephen Elliott snapped some photos of the Senate hopeful conversing intimately with a college newspaper reporter this past April.
According to political blog Wonkette, Elliott recounted to Majority Report Radio that Harris "sat (the reporter) down, sat next to him, and her foot was brushing against his foot, her knee was half-an-inch away, she leaned in real close and started calling him 'honey.'"
Coo, coo, ca-choo, Katherine Harris.
No. 9: A joke about troops in Iraq by Vietnam War veteran Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) doesn't exactly go over well.
During the 2004 presidential election, the Democratic candidate tried to portray himself as a smarter alternative to Republican incumbent George W. Bush, whose alleged intellectual limits have been the subject of many a Saturday Night Live sketch.
Critics assailed Kerry for coming across as elitist, overeducated and out of touch with the average American. Two years later, he still hasn't been able to shake that image.
In a campaign appearance for California gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides at Pasadena City College on October 30, the Massachusetts senator made an unfortunate remark: "If you make the most of (education), you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
Video of Kerry's speech in Pasadena hit YouTube almost instantaneously, and the outrage began.
Kerry was widely criticized for stereotyping the American soldier as uneducated. While he claimed that he was actually making a jab at President Bush's blunders in Iraq, the stigma remained.
No 8: Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) might need to look up the word "Internet."
C-Span might not have the draw of, say, Grey's Anatomy, but if you watch it enough, you can pick up some real gems. Like this one: in the year's most famous case of metaphors gone awry, Stevens declared on the Senate floor that "the Internet is not a big truck. It's a series of tubes." OK, politicians aren't always tech-savvy. And Stevens isn't exactly young. So it's acceptable, right?
Unfortunately, this speech was in front of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, discussing the hot-button subject of Net neutrality. Stevens is chairman of the committee. It didn't exactly make tech-savvy viewers too confident that such a powerful decision maker in American tech policy, well, didn't seem to understand what the Internet was.
Thanks to the C-Span footage, the "Series of Tubes" became the latest Web-spawned catchphrase, following the likes of "all your base are belong to us" and "snakes on a plane."
Comedy Central anchor Jon Stewart lambasted the octogenarian senator in multiple episodes of The Daily Show. We at CNET News.com think that Stevens should be very proud that his botched metaphor merited a techno remix.
No. 7: Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) is caught ditching an eco-friendly vehicle for a gas-guzzler after an alternative-energy event.
One of the things that politicians tend to forget is that the cameras can be anywhere. Anywhere. Hastert, for example, spoke at a news conference in April to address rising gas prices and the need for alternative fuel. He made a big, public exit from the conference in a hydrogen-fueled car, only to ditch it a few minutes later for a big black SUV, once he was out of camera view. Unfortunately for Hastert, an anonymous camera wielder happened to snap a photo of the switcheroo. MSNBC newscaster Keith Olbermann was, naturally, all over it.
It should be noted that Rep. Hastert probably needed to travel in the standard government SUV for security purposes. But still, it looked pretty dumb.
No. 6: Vice President Dick Cheney, in the wake of his much-publicized hunting accident, brutally murders the Easter Bunny at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll.
What? You say this didn't actually happen? Nonsense. The witnesses to Cheney's February hunting accident may not have been videotaping when he mistakenly shot lawyer Harry Whittington, but the YouTube gods don't care. When something doesn't wind up on camera, after all, a little Photoshop or Final Cut expertise can change things.
Video-sharing sites soon exploded with parodies that ranged from a spoof of a similar hunting-accident scene in the movie Wedding Crashers to a song-and-dance number set to the tune of Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues." Other Internet video creations suggested that Cheney's shooting of Whittington might not have been an isolated incident; this one, for example, spliced real news coverage of the annual White House Easter Egg Roll with staged footage of an actor dressed up as Cheney shooting the Easter Bunny.
[color=orange]No. 5: Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) tells The Colbert Report audience that cocaine is a fun thing to do.
Wexler probably didn't see it coming. Appearances on Comedy Central's fake pundit show, The Colbert Report can be risky, but Wexler most likely thought he'd be all right--after all, the five-term congressman, who represents a district in Palm Beach County, was running unopposed for re-election in 2006.
Show host Stephen Colbert took advantage of that fact during an interview with Wexler and prompted him to say something that would normally jeopardize a politician's election results.
Encouraging Wexler to finish the sentence, Colbert said, "I enjoy cocaine because..."
After some hesitation and slipups on Wexler's part, and additional goading from Colbert, the congressman said with a perfectly straight face, "I enjoy cocaine because it's a fun thing to do."
Good thing he was running uncontested.
No 4: Rep. John Sweeney (R-N.Y.), shows up blotto at a frat party.
Fraternity parties often have uninvited guests. Usually, they're local cops who've come to shut down the mischief. But members of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity at upstate New York's Union College were probably quite shocked by an unexpected after-midnight visitor to one of their on-campus parties in April: John Sweeney, a local congressional representative. According to the Albany Times-Union, Sweeney was visibly intoxicated when he arrived.
Here's the thing about college kids. They all have digital cameras, and they love to use them at parties. Consequently, a Union College student managed to get plenty of incriminating photographs. And within hours, they'd hit the blogosphere. No amount of excuse making from Sweeney's office could cover this one up.
Sweeney lost his bid for re-election on Nov. 7 to Democratic challenger Kirsten Gillibrand, partially because he was plagued by allegations of domestic abuse. But don't worry, Mr. Congressman. Those Alpha Delta Phi brothers will probably welcome you back with open arms.
No. 3: Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) uses an unfortunate metaphor in front of the cameras. Then he does it again.
Basic logic: when you say something stupid once, you generally don't repeat it in another speech. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like anybody told that to Burns, who said on two separate occasions in August that terrorists "drive taxicabs in the daytime and kill at night."
Both times, the remark was caught on video. Many audiences took it as a nasty racist jab.
And with video evidence of Burns making the statement on two separate occasions, it becomes less of an excusable mistake and more of, well, just plain mean spirit.
Burns, like previous top-10 lister John Sweeney, failed to win re-election in November: Burns was narrowly edged out by Democrat Jon Tester. But also like Sweeney, Burns had his fair share of other issues. The Montana senator appears to have been involved with the shady dealings of jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
[color=orange]No 2: Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) forgets to do his homework.
When Congressman Westmoreland made an appearance on The Colbert Report in June, the embarrassing gaffe that ensued wasn't something he said--as in the case of Robert Wexler's "I enjoy cocaine" line--but rather something he didn't say.
Westmoreland was the co-sponsor of a controversial bill to install Ten Commandments displays in the Senate and House of Representatives. But when show host Stephen Colbert asked him to actually list the Ten Commandments, he couldn't name more than three.
Oops.
Luckily for Westmoreland, he still managed to win re-election in his heavily Republican district in Georgia. Unfortunately, he still has to deal with being known as the "Ten Commandments guy."
No. 1: Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) and his campaign staff don't seem to know that, well, stuff gets videotaped.
Of course this is our No. 1 political mishap caught on camera. How couldn't it be? Allen was comfortably ahead of challenger James Webb in the polls until he uttered a single word that quite possibly cost the 2008 presidential contender his seat--and maybe even cost the Republicans their majority in the Senate. That word was "macaca."
At an August campaign event in Breaks, Va., Allen singled out a Webb volunteer in the audience, referring to him as "macaca" and "welcoming" him "to America and the real world of Virginia."
The volunteer, S.R. Sidarth, happened to be a U.S. citizen of Indian descent who was born in Virginia. And "macaca" happens to be an obscure racial slur in North Africa, where Allen's mother was born. It may be derived from the French word for a type of monkey: macaque. You do the math.
If it hadn't been for camcorders and YouTube, the "macaca" incident might not have spread beyond that sleepy town in western Virginia. But in the Digital Age, that just isn't the case.
You'd think Allen's campaign would've watched its steps after that. But in late October, some of Allen's staffers used a questionable degree of force in removing a dissenting blogger from an appearance in Charlottesville, Va. And yet again, the video cameras were there.
Should George Allen ever try to run for office again, CNET News.com recommends that he hire staffers who know what camcorders look like.
So are those the worst, have any better, do you hate me for making long posts?
No 10: Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) plays Mrs. Robinson with a college reporter.
The soon-to-be-former congresswoman made a name for herself as Florida's secretary of state during the controversial 2000 presidential election. Characterized by outlandish statements about religion, abrupt staff shakeups, tight-fitting shirts and questionable colors of eyeshadow, Harris was considered a longshot indeed in her (unsuccessful) bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson this year. But she never lost her campaign trail spirit--or her charm, as was evident when photographer Stephen Elliott snapped some photos of the Senate hopeful conversing intimately with a college newspaper reporter this past April.
According to political blog Wonkette, Elliott recounted to Majority Report Radio that Harris "sat (the reporter) down, sat next to him, and her foot was brushing against his foot, her knee was half-an-inch away, she leaned in real close and started calling him 'honey.'"
Coo, coo, ca-choo, Katherine Harris.
No. 9: A joke about troops in Iraq by Vietnam War veteran Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) doesn't exactly go over well.
During the 2004 presidential election, the Democratic candidate tried to portray himself as a smarter alternative to Republican incumbent George W. Bush, whose alleged intellectual limits have been the subject of many a Saturday Night Live sketch.
Critics assailed Kerry for coming across as elitist, overeducated and out of touch with the average American. Two years later, he still hasn't been able to shake that image.
In a campaign appearance for California gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides at Pasadena City College on October 30, the Massachusetts senator made an unfortunate remark: "If you make the most of (education), you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
Video of Kerry's speech in Pasadena hit YouTube almost instantaneously, and the outrage began.
Kerry was widely criticized for stereotyping the American soldier as uneducated. While he claimed that he was actually making a jab at President Bush's blunders in Iraq, the stigma remained.
No 8: Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) might need to look up the word "Internet."
C-Span might not have the draw of, say, Grey's Anatomy, but if you watch it enough, you can pick up some real gems. Like this one: in the year's most famous case of metaphors gone awry, Stevens declared on the Senate floor that "the Internet is not a big truck. It's a series of tubes." OK, politicians aren't always tech-savvy. And Stevens isn't exactly young. So it's acceptable, right?
Unfortunately, this speech was in front of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, discussing the hot-button subject of Net neutrality. Stevens is chairman of the committee. It didn't exactly make tech-savvy viewers too confident that such a powerful decision maker in American tech policy, well, didn't seem to understand what the Internet was.
Thanks to the C-Span footage, the "Series of Tubes" became the latest Web-spawned catchphrase, following the likes of "all your base are belong to us" and "snakes on a plane."
Comedy Central anchor Jon Stewart lambasted the octogenarian senator in multiple episodes of The Daily Show. We at CNET News.com think that Stevens should be very proud that his botched metaphor merited a techno remix.
No. 7: Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) is caught ditching an eco-friendly vehicle for a gas-guzzler after an alternative-energy event.
One of the things that politicians tend to forget is that the cameras can be anywhere. Anywhere. Hastert, for example, spoke at a news conference in April to address rising gas prices and the need for alternative fuel. He made a big, public exit from the conference in a hydrogen-fueled car, only to ditch it a few minutes later for a big black SUV, once he was out of camera view. Unfortunately for Hastert, an anonymous camera wielder happened to snap a photo of the switcheroo. MSNBC newscaster Keith Olbermann was, naturally, all over it.
It should be noted that Rep. Hastert probably needed to travel in the standard government SUV for security purposes. But still, it looked pretty dumb.
No. 6: Vice President Dick Cheney, in the wake of his much-publicized hunting accident, brutally murders the Easter Bunny at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll.
What? You say this didn't actually happen? Nonsense. The witnesses to Cheney's February hunting accident may not have been videotaping when he mistakenly shot lawyer Harry Whittington, but the YouTube gods don't care. When something doesn't wind up on camera, after all, a little Photoshop or Final Cut expertise can change things.
Video-sharing sites soon exploded with parodies that ranged from a spoof of a similar hunting-accident scene in the movie Wedding Crashers to a song-and-dance number set to the tune of Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues." Other Internet video creations suggested that Cheney's shooting of Whittington might not have been an isolated incident; this one, for example, spliced real news coverage of the annual White House Easter Egg Roll with staged footage of an actor dressed up as Cheney shooting the Easter Bunny.
[color=orange]No. 5: Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) tells The Colbert Report audience that cocaine is a fun thing to do.
Wexler probably didn't see it coming. Appearances on Comedy Central's fake pundit show, The Colbert Report can be risky, but Wexler most likely thought he'd be all right--after all, the five-term congressman, who represents a district in Palm Beach County, was running unopposed for re-election in 2006.
Show host Stephen Colbert took advantage of that fact during an interview with Wexler and prompted him to say something that would normally jeopardize a politician's election results.
Encouraging Wexler to finish the sentence, Colbert said, "I enjoy cocaine because..."
After some hesitation and slipups on Wexler's part, and additional goading from Colbert, the congressman said with a perfectly straight face, "I enjoy cocaine because it's a fun thing to do."
Good thing he was running uncontested.
No 4: Rep. John Sweeney (R-N.Y.), shows up blotto at a frat party.
Fraternity parties often have uninvited guests. Usually, they're local cops who've come to shut down the mischief. But members of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity at upstate New York's Union College were probably quite shocked by an unexpected after-midnight visitor to one of their on-campus parties in April: John Sweeney, a local congressional representative. According to the Albany Times-Union, Sweeney was visibly intoxicated when he arrived.
Here's the thing about college kids. They all have digital cameras, and they love to use them at parties. Consequently, a Union College student managed to get plenty of incriminating photographs. And within hours, they'd hit the blogosphere. No amount of excuse making from Sweeney's office could cover this one up.
Sweeney lost his bid for re-election on Nov. 7 to Democratic challenger Kirsten Gillibrand, partially because he was plagued by allegations of domestic abuse. But don't worry, Mr. Congressman. Those Alpha Delta Phi brothers will probably welcome you back with open arms.
No. 3: Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) uses an unfortunate metaphor in front of the cameras. Then he does it again.
Basic logic: when you say something stupid once, you generally don't repeat it in another speech. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like anybody told that to Burns, who said on two separate occasions in August that terrorists "drive taxicabs in the daytime and kill at night."
Both times, the remark was caught on video. Many audiences took it as a nasty racist jab.
And with video evidence of Burns making the statement on two separate occasions, it becomes less of an excusable mistake and more of, well, just plain mean spirit.
Burns, like previous top-10 lister John Sweeney, failed to win re-election in November: Burns was narrowly edged out by Democrat Jon Tester. But also like Sweeney, Burns had his fair share of other issues. The Montana senator appears to have been involved with the shady dealings of jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
[color=orange]No 2: Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) forgets to do his homework.
When Congressman Westmoreland made an appearance on The Colbert Report in June, the embarrassing gaffe that ensued wasn't something he said--as in the case of Robert Wexler's "I enjoy cocaine" line--but rather something he didn't say.
Westmoreland was the co-sponsor of a controversial bill to install Ten Commandments displays in the Senate and House of Representatives. But when show host Stephen Colbert asked him to actually list the Ten Commandments, he couldn't name more than three.
Oops.
Luckily for Westmoreland, he still managed to win re-election in his heavily Republican district in Georgia. Unfortunately, he still has to deal with being known as the "Ten Commandments guy."
No. 1: Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) and his campaign staff don't seem to know that, well, stuff gets videotaped.
Of course this is our No. 1 political mishap caught on camera. How couldn't it be? Allen was comfortably ahead of challenger James Webb in the polls until he uttered a single word that quite possibly cost the 2008 presidential contender his seat--and maybe even cost the Republicans their majority in the Senate. That word was "macaca."
At an August campaign event in Breaks, Va., Allen singled out a Webb volunteer in the audience, referring to him as "macaca" and "welcoming" him "to America and the real world of Virginia."
The volunteer, S.R. Sidarth, happened to be a U.S. citizen of Indian descent who was born in Virginia. And "macaca" happens to be an obscure racial slur in North Africa, where Allen's mother was born. It may be derived from the French word for a type of monkey: macaque. You do the math.
If it hadn't been for camcorders and YouTube, the "macaca" incident might not have spread beyond that sleepy town in western Virginia. But in the Digital Age, that just isn't the case.
You'd think Allen's campaign would've watched its steps after that. But in late October, some of Allen's staffers used a questionable degree of force in removing a dissenting blogger from an appearance in Charlottesville, Va. And yet again, the video cameras were there.
Should George Allen ever try to run for office again, CNET News.com recommends that he hire staffers who know what camcorders look like.
So are those the worst, have any better, do you hate me for making long posts?
