When a candidate says something that sounds silly/offensive/insane, you have to ask yourself why they said what they did. Sometimes people just misspeak - slips-of-the-tongue happen to the best of us. Then again, sometimes people actually have the facts wrong - they meant what they said, they were just incorrect. And sometimes you just have to wonder.

Type I - The '57 states' thing is a good example of a tongue-slip. Does anybody honestly think Obama had his facts wrong on that one? You can argue over whether he meant to say '50 states' or '57 (something elses)', but nobody thinks he's actually confused.

Type II - McCain's Sunni-Shia confusion appears to have been him simply getting it wrong. Obama's statement about his great uncle liberating the wrong concentration camp may also fall into this category. The importance you attach to this kind of mistake should be commensurate with the importance you attach to a POTUS having a firm grasp of the relevant subject matter.

But sometimes ... what can you say? McCain's 'hot bottled water' isn't a Type I (he didn't accidentally say the wrong word, he added a word). It isn't a Type II either, because I seriously doubt he actually holds the false belief that aid workers habitually pass out piping-hot water bottles to babies. My guess is that he simply thought the speech was going somewhere other than where it went - he was thinking 'hot meals', but got teleprompted off track.

The only way we can really 'diagnose; this type of screw-up is to see how often McCain makes them, presently and historically. If he rarely messes up like this, who cares? If he messes up frequently, has he always been that bad? If not...?

This is exactly right.

We should judge our candidates on two primary points -- inspiration and policy. Parsing their words, especially when said once, when tired, and then not repeated, is not that interesting. However, when repeated, we have policy -- and when a candidate chronically misspeaks (W) we have to worry about both policy and inspiration.

Beathan