On Tuesday, President Joe Biden faced another bout with that longtime challenger — the teleprompter — and was woefully defeated yet again.
This time around, the teleprompter dealt him a hefty blow in the form of the words “Gila” and “Washoe,” the names of a river in Arizona and a county in Nevada, respectively.
The president was delivering remarks at the National Association of Counties legislative conference in Washington when he pointed to infrastructure developments in those areas — and stumbled across the pronunciation so badly that the White House doctored the official transcript of his remarks to downplay the flub.
Another day, another glaring indication that Team Biden is doing everything it can to downplay the president’s seemingly failing cognitive function and/or general lack of engagement with his job, which is one of the most critical on Earth.
As Biden told conference attendees of the federal government’s investment in infrastructure in Maricopa County, Arizona, he pointed to a bridge that had been built over the Gila River.
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Now, as the proud mother of two budding and very enthusiastic naturalists, I have had a great many conversations over the word “Gila,” as it has also been used to christen a certain desert-dwelling lizard that tends to hold a particular fascination for little boys, the Gila monster.
The word is often heard pronounced either with an “H” sound for the “G” or, errantly, simply a hard “G” by English speakers.
Biden, however, went with a very odd pronunciation, tossing out both the Spanish word (believed to be derived from a word in the local Yuma language) and the obvious anglicized mispronunciation that most English speakers would go with.
Instead, he opted for something that sounded like “holly.”
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This was followed up immediately by the president stumbling over how to say Washoe County in Nevada, stutteringly calling it “Warshaw” before correcting himself to say “waa-shoe” as it is correctly pronounced.
Now, the official White House transcript accurately recorded this mispronunciation, adding a “[sic]” to the incorrect word he used along with brackets for another error, like so: “Look, in Warshaw [sic] — or, excuse me, Washoe County in Nevada, we’re spending $89 billion [million] to add several lanes to the US-395.”
Yet whoever it is that has the arduous task of translating Biden’s comments to the printed word could not bring himself or herself to do the same with his botching of “Gila.”
Rather than a strikethrough of “Holly” along with “[sic],” it was printed exactly as it is spelled. “In Maricopa County in Arizona, we helped build a new bridge over the — over the Gila River,” the transcript reads.
Not only is this hardly the first time that the president issued a glaring gaffe from the podium (this is only a remarkable story because this is the norm, not the exception, for 80-year-old president), but it’s not even the first time that the White House has altered a transcript where he did.
And of course, we all know of his history of being defeated by the teleprompter.
It’s almost getting tiring asking the question at this point, but it also cannot be ignored.
