That is, apparently, it for Gordon Brown. I haven’t been following the UK election very closely, but the BBC news feed was rife last week with stories on Brown’s big blunder, which may have cost him a large chunk of the election.
What happened was, after an interview with a voter who challenged his stance on immigration, he got into a car, not realizing his microphone was still on. Talking to an aide while being driven off, he called the woman he had spoken to “bigoted.”
So what?
It strikes me as naive to think that every politician doesn’t do stuff like that. The flip side of maintaining a public face is that you have to let off steam every once in a while in private. It’s not even just public figures! I’m sure everyone with even a slightly stressful job occasionally feels aggravation towards some incompetent moron at work, and deals with it by calling them an “incompetent moron” in the privacy of their own home. If your employer bugged your house and disciplined you for saying something like that, well, that would be just about equivalent to the British media broadcasting and making a fuss about Brown’s remark.
Hold humans to superhuman standards and you will only be disappointed.
The Mad Scientist Review 