HI GUYS SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS THINKS JFK AND KENNEDY WERE TWO DIFFERENT PRESIDENTS HAVE A GREAT AFTERNOON. pic.twitter.com/yfxT9MJw5e
— Amanda Guinzburg (@Guinz) October 31, 2017
Sarah Huckabee Sanders listed "JFK" and "Kennedy" as two different presidents during Tuesday's briefing, and Twitter was unforgiving.
Sanders' gaffe happened while she tried to defend White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly's controversial comment on the Civil War. He told interiewer Laura Ingraham that the Civil War arose from “the lack of an ability to compromise, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand,” during a discussion over the toppling of Confederate statues.
New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush asked Sanders to explain what Kelly meant about his "compromise" comment. Sanders replied:
“Look, all of our leaders have flaws — Washington, Jefferson, JFK, Roosevelt, Kennedy. That doesn’t diminish their contributions to our country and it certainly can’t erase them from our history.”
Unless there's something in those unreleased assassination documents, it's still hard to forgive the Press Secretary for her verbal slip.
Listing "JFK" and "Kennedy" as examples didn't even occur to her as she continued defending the former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security. “General Kelly was simply making the point that just because history isn’t perfect doesn’t mean that it’s not our history.”
Reporters weren't letting up over Kelly's Civil War coments during the briefing. Trump alleging Andrew Jackson being upset over the Civil War, even though it was fought 16 years after Jackson's death, was brought up by another reporter who asked Sanders to elaborate on Kelly's meaning of "compromise."
“I don’t know if I’m going to get into debating the Civil War,” she said.
"I’m not going to get up here and relitigate the Civil War, but there’s certainly, I think, some historical documentation that many people, and there’s pretty strong consensus — people from the left, the right, the North and the South — that believe that if some of the individuals engaged had been willing to come to some compromises on different things, it might not have had occurred."
The curious thing about Sanders' verbal blunder left some wondering if it was a blunder at all.
A helpful tip on public speaking:
There's no shortage of conspiracy theories when it comes to the Kennedys and the JFKs.
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H/T - twitter, huffingtonpost, bostonglobe
