What I meant to say was...

"Say what you mean and mean what you say." "Words have meaning." Two quotes from the president. Try to square that with, "What he meant to say was..."

Clearly there must be a morbid aversion in Washington to saying either,"I was wrong", or "He was wrong". People aren't wrong any more; they just didn't say what they meant. Joe Biden said that if you sneeze on an airplane, everyone is exposed to whatever it is that sneezes carry. The next day some staffer enlighltened us by saying that what Joe really meant to say was that if you are not feeling well you should stay away from public places.

Obviously, we must be idiots. Or lack memories. If Biden's first statement sounds anything like the revised version then Houston, we have a problem.

Would that I had this power when I was in school. If I realized overnight that I had answered a question incorrectly on an exam taken the previous day, I could recall my test and correct my mistakes and write, "What I meant to say was..." next to the correction. As I learned, I could have gone back and corrected all of my mistakes, and I coulda been a straight A student (or maybe evan a contender). How can you learn from your mistakes if after the fact someone convinces others that you really didn't make a mistake? You really weren't wrong afer all. Orwellian?

David Letterman came closer to admitting a mistake then some although I think it took a battery of reporters hammering on him until he admitted that his Sarah Palin joke wasn't funny. But in apologizing he acted like he just found out that there's a difference between intent and perception. Really? After a lifetime in comedy, he's just finding that out? At some point you have to operate as if what the other person heard is what you said. And if what they heard isn't what you want them to hear, then say it again until you agree that what they heard is what This is even worse than political spin. It's lying. It's creating the appearance that either (a) the person doesn't know how to communicate or correct themselves or (b) they are morons who need other people to correct their mistakes. Either way they don't come out very well. Are they going to go back to the text of their first statement and change it? In that way history will not recall their mistakes. It will only recall the corrected copy.

There isn't a human being I know who hasn't regretted certain things they have said. No one that I know of is free from making mistakes. The best of them know how to recognize when they are wrong and correct themselves (accent on themselves) as soon as they realize their error.

I read somewhere that a famous scientist stated that he liked to be wrong at least three times before breakfast. In that way he could constantly be correcting his erraneous beliefs and knowledge of the world.

Is it too much for our politicians and their staff to begin a new approach to how they communicate at a less taxing level and admit, let's say, to being wrong perhaps once a day?

Yeah. Right.