Episode 27 - BREAKING: Presidential Spelling Errors Doom Humanity Featuring Coffee and Dale

Date: 2018-06-18 | Duration: 16:08

Topics

Dale weighs in on the horror.

Transcript

[0:05]

Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum ba. Come on everybody, get in here. We’ve got to talk about the important, important things that are happening in our day. Now, while you’re doing this, I have a special request from a viewer. You might appreciate this, too. Hold on. I’ve been asked to show you a closer look at this photo that’s always behind my hand. So here it is. This photo’s maybe ten years old or something like that, and that was my old cat, Sara, sitting in a chair there. Well, now you know.

[1:12]

Let’s talk. You may have noticed that there’s a big problem in the world. Oh ho ho, you thought we had problems? You’ve seen nothing until you’ve heard about spelling-gate. Yes, the President of the United States sometimes spells a word wrong. I know, I know. You didn’t see this coming. You probably thought to yourself, “Thank God we have elected the man who never spells anything wrong. We’re all safe now.” But no, he let us down again. Somebody just said, “OMG, I’m self-supporting.” And I think this risk was captured best in a tweet this morning by Christopher C. Cuomo, better known for his job at CNN. I’d like to read this tweet in the voice of…

[2:17]

…in the voice of… hey, Dale? Dale, can you come over here for a minute? I’d like to have Dale read this tweet: “Who cares that Trump spelled another simple word wrong? I do! I do! As weird as it is to set aside that here’s POTUS—POTUS, POTUS—what does POTUS with no capital letters mean? Is that the same as POTUS with all capital letters? And should present a level of proficiency? Misspelling counsel shows a haste, a lack of thought that is a requirement for responsible leadership.” Why? You want reasons? I’ll give you a reason!

[3:18]

Well, here’s my reason: It just is. It just is. I don’t need no reasons. That’s the end of the world: spelling errors. Thank you, Dale. Shut up, Dale. All right, now let me try to put some context on this. While the elected President of the United States of America—the most powerful military and economy in the history of civilization—while we were working on denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, that looked like a problem. You thought to yourself, “Well, nuclear war, that looks like a problem.” No, that’s not a problem. Typos are a problem. Spelling errors, typos, bad tweets—that’s the sort of stuff you need to worry about. Now you may have noticed a shift.

[4:21]

You may have noticed a shift. You may have noticed that the anti-Trumpers went from “He’s Hitler, Hitler, Hitler” until that started looking silly. Once you move your embassy to Jerusalem and… well, I could go on and on, but the Hitler thing just started looking silly after a while. So they changed that to, “Well, no, he is mentally incompetent.” Except that there’s no evidence of that. He took a test, and he passed it, and we haven’t seen any evidence yet. So then they went to, “Well, maybe he’s not crazy, technically, but he’s certainly stupid,” or “He golfs too much.” And then James Comey comes out and tells the world that he’s actually very smart. When you sit in a meeting with him, he tracks the conversation and you ask good questions. Then people were like, “Ah, Comey! Can’t we depend on you to give us that one thing? Give us something!”

[5:21]

Then it turned out, okay, he’s not a Hitler. He’s not crazy. He’s not exactly stupid. And maybe he’s not colluding with Russia like we thought. But I know there’s something wrong here. Sure, North Korea is talking about denuclearizing, which they have never done in any prior administration—I’m going to call that luck. There’s something wrong with this guy. Okay, the economy is screaming and that part’s good, but there’s something wrong with this guy. I know it, I know it. And I think I found it: He cannot spell the tweet! They were starting to prepare a little place on Mount Rushmore. They kind of had it all surveyed. They thought, “This chunk of granite will really work. We’ll carve him right into there, right into the side, put him right next to one of the presidents.”

[6:23]

And then that tweet came out. Are you really going to put him on Mount Rushmore—somebody who spells like that? I don’t care how many nuclear wars you end; if you spell like that, you’re not my president. You can’t be my president. Let me give you some more context. I said this in my tweet this morning: I’m old enough to remember that when big corporations decided to let their employees have Casual Friday and dress casual on Friday—I kid you not—the conversation in corporate America was whether it was going to destroy the world. Because as soon as you let people dress anyway they want, all your discipline breaks down and then everything just falls apart. Now, I do think there is something to the way you dress and the way you look. There is something to that; it does change how…

[7:25]

…how you think and feel and act. But the world didn’t fall apart. It really didn’t. Instead, what you ended up with is Apple Computer, Google, Facebook—biggest companies in the world—and they all dress pretty casually, if you know what I mean. I also remember when I first joined corporate America, the process for writing a memo. This will be hard to believe for anybody below a certain age, but before computers, you would write a memo out and you’d give it to a secretary who would retype the memo, fix any typos or whatever. Then you’d have to run it by somebody to get another set of eyes on it. Then you would give it to your boss, because your boss would never let a memo go out that had a spelling error. If anybody from the boss’s department sent out a memo with a spelling error, it was like the end of the freaking world.

[8:26]

You thought, “Oh my god, come into my office. We’ve got to talk. Look at this memo!” This was the phone company, so we set up this elaborate process by which you can approve a memo to make sure there were no spelling errors. How long did it take to write a memo? A week, sometimes two weeks. Sometimes two weeks—I’m not even making it up. We would have to go back a few times, and you’d retype it, and the secretary would be busy, and then the boss would be busy, and then he’s on vacation for a week, and the person filling in doesn’t want to approve it—“Why don’t you wait a week?” So, writing a memo and making sure that you did it right took about a week or two. Then computers came, and secretaries sort of got phased out. So the days of having somebody else type your stuff went away. And then what happened? Typos became acceptable.

[9:28]

They were just normal. Everybody was typo-ing and spelling things wrong just all over the place. Did it matter? Yeah, not much. Sending out a typo is still bad; you’d rather you didn’t do it. I wish I hadn’t done it. I wish I hadn’t sent out 50 tweets just in the past 12 years that I had to pull back because there was some mistake or other on them. Now, President Trump has called himself “Modern Presidential,” and we joke about it, but in this one sense, he’s completely right. Having your president be unfiltered by the watchers and the spell-checkers and the typists and God knows what gives me a sense that I’m getting his actual thoughts, and it’s unfiltered.

[10:29]

Ask yourself: Would you rather have an occasional typo from your president, or not know if you’re getting his real thoughts? Because if they’re so perfect, it must be going through at least a few checkers who are saying, “I wouldn’t quite say it this way, Mr. President. I’d take this word out.” Then what’s he doing? Instead of sending out these great tweets, which will someday be immortalized as the greatest things ever, you’d be like, “Screw it, it’s too hard to send a tweet if I’ve got to fight with you every time I make a tweet. I don’t even want to do it.” You would end up just not doing it after a while; it would just be annoying every time. Instead, we get Modern Presidential. We get it fresh, we get it raw, we get the spelling errors. And does it make any difference? Not really. Do you think that China just said to itself…

[11:30]

“We were going to renegotiate this trade deal, but once we saw how you spelled ‘counsel,’ all deals are off”? Nope. Nope. Everybody did the same thing that you and I did. We looked at it and said, “Oh, spelled the word wrong. Spelled the word wrong.” Guess what? He eats cheeseburgers. Guess what? He’s not perfect. So what? When you see a transition from “He’s Hitler,” “He is colluding with Russia,” “He’s insane,” “He’s incompetent,” “He is just in it for the money”—when you see all of those things start to fade away and they’re being replaced with, “Looks like we’re going to have some success with North Korea,” “Maybe the economy is doing great,” “ISIS is being beaten back”—once you’re…

[12:31]

…once you’re down to typos, you won. You won. If all your enemies have left is typos, you won. [Music] Stocks are down in 2018? They’re not down from 2017, are they? I would expect stocks to take a breather in 2018 a little bit. All right, the Tapper book. So, Jake Tapper. Yeah, let’s talk about Jake Tapper. I’m getting some pushback because I tweeted Jake’s upcoming book. He’s written a fiction book, a thriller, I believe. I don’t know too much about it, but here’s a comment I want to make about Jake. I know some of you are anti-CNN, so you’re anti-Jake, etc.

[13:31]

But here’s another great example—I like to give you examples of this—of a talent stack. Here are the talents that Jake Tapper has. (Oh, sorry, you probably know he’s a cartoonist. He actually was a guest cartoonist for Dilbert when I was having some guest cartoonists do some stuff, and I found out to my chagrin that he’s a better cartoonist than I am—at least a better artist.) He also does non-fiction. Obviously, he writes his material for the show. He speaks well in public. He’s got good, obviously good grammar. He probably spells really well. I think his background is history; I think he’s a historian. He knows politics. He’s good with people. He has a really deep set of talents. But again, if you were to look at any one of those talents, you might say to yourself, “Well, that’s not the best one in the world,” but man…

[14:34]

…that guy’s got a lot of talents that fit together really nicely. So it’s not an accident he’s doing well. You can hate him for his opinions or whatever you want to do, but you can’t take that away from him. There’s an insane amount of talent that fits really well together in that one person. All right, I’m not going to talk about Kanye anymore today unless he has some more excellent tweets, but boy did Kanye open up a hole in reality. I hope you saw my Periscope from yesterday about that. All right, I believe I’ve done all the sarcasm I need for today. I’m just looking at your…

[15:35]

…your questions coming in. Shania Twain, yeah. So, Shania Twain had to apologize. She’s Canadian, but she had to apologize for saying that she might have voted for Trump if she had a chance. It’s amazing that you have to apologize for that. All right, I think that’s enough for now, and I will talk to you all maybe later today. We’ll see. Bye for now.