On Face The Nation last Sunday, Nikki Haley misremembered the date of the most infamous terrorist attack ever perpetrated on American soil, a date engraved in American memory:
MARGARET BRENNAN: If elected, would you adhere to the premise that an attack on one is an attack on all?
NIKKI HALEY: I mean, absolutely. NATO has been a success story for the last 75 years. But what bothers me about this is, don't take the side of a thug, who kills his opponents. don't take the side of someone who has gone in and invaded a country and half a million people have died or been wounded because of Putin. Don't take the side of someone who continues to lie. I dealt with Russia every day. The last thing we ever want to do is side with Russia. What we always need to remember is America needs to have friends. After September 10, we needed a lot of friends, we can never get into the point where we don't need friends. Now, we do want NATO allies to pull their weight. But there are ways you can do that without sitting there and telling Russia, have your way with these countries. That's not what we want. If you notice, Russia has never invaded a NATO country. They've invaded Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. They are actually very intimidated by, by NATO. NATO allows us to prevent war. We need to always focus on preventing war.
Why September 10? What happened that changed the world on that day? In 2010, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN went online, but the Universe wasn't swallowed by a black hole. I think. So, why September 10?
Of course, Haley was referring to the September 11 terrorist attacks, and her point here is overall accurate, and once upon a time would have held bipartisan consensus— before the modern Republican Party went to war on even the possibility of elective government and became the collective useful idiot of Vladimir Putin. That’s the real story here, and in a healthy political and media environment Haley’s mistake legitimately wouldn’t be noteworthy.
Politicians, like all people, sometimes bungle names or dates. That’s all Haley did. Joe Biden has done it for decades, but the media ignore that history because they have a narrative to sell, no matter how false and no matter much damage it does to the nation and the world. It’s their way. So, if Joe Biden made such a gaffe about such a historic and infamously iconic date it would be the lede on every TV news show and above the fold on almost every major newspaper. Of course, if Trump had made such a gaffe, the media would have all but ignored it.
The future of elective and representative government, the future of the alliance of democratic nations, even the possibility of mitigating climate change before it becomes a global catastrophe, and the basic human and civil rights of women, immigrants, the LGBTIQA+ community, and all racial and religious minorities are under dire threat, and all the media want to do is to tear Joe Biden down. He's old. He's also been a great president. Maybe being old— and experienced— is a good thing. Maybe the legacy media are not.