by Stephen Green
“What a waste it is to lose one’s mind,” Vice President Dan Quayle said during an address to the NAACP in 1989, mangling the organization’s motto. “Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”
All he had to say was, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
The cringe was strong in that brief moment, so strong that I only had to look up Quayle’s misquote to make sure I’d remembered it exactly — and I had. Partly because, as someone who started doing public speaking in high school, I know that sick feeling, the icy ball in the stomach that comes from screwing up an easy line in front of hundreds or thousands of people.
But mostly I remember because the media wouldn’t let it go for years. When I searched online to verify the ’89 Quayle misquote, the best result was from a 1992 Los Angeles Times op-ed. The media drilled that line into our heads like a kindergarten phonics lesson.
Quayle flubbed one line. Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee, is infamous for tossing word salads like a coked-up spider monkey with a giant bowl full of Scrabble tiles.
Well, Harris is infamous on the Right because we pay attention to what goes on behind the media’s curtain. If the Lefty press gave Harris anything like the coverage they gave to Quayle, she’d have been laughed off the national stage years ago. As Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Readers™ know, I’ve been doing my bit to help that along.