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White House Scrubs Kamala Harris' North Korea Gaffe from the Official Transcript - But the Video Lives On

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Americans who might have been spooked by President Joe Biden’s evident search for a deceased congresswoman on Wednesday got another reason to worry on Thursday.

Standing on the global stage, along the most heavily fortified border in the world, Vice President Kamala Harris committed a slip of the tongue that would have gotten her mauled by the mainstream media if she had an “R” after her name instead of a “D.”

But with the echoes from Biden’s disturbing mental lapse still reverberating, Harris’ flub is being largely ignored by the mainstream media and covered up by the White House.

Standing at the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South Korea — two nations still technically at war since a 1953 armistice ended three years of combat — the vice president of the United States declared her country in an “alliance” with the completely wrong side.

“The United States shares a very important relationship, which is an alliance with the Republic of North Korea,” Harris said. “And it is an alliance that is strong and enduring.”

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Unless there’s been a remarkable change in decades of U.S. policy on the Korean Peninsula, what Harris meant to say was “the Republic of Korea,” which is South Korea’s official name. North Korea’s official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

(Notice neither side accepts the geographical division. Both claim all of Korea as their jurisdiction.)

But it’s exactly the kind of embarrassing mistake that no official of the United States should make in a region of the world at perennial risk of open warfare. And even if the mainstream media has been obediently quiet about it, the news spread quickly on social media.

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“Please tell me this is a deep fake,” wrote Monica Crowley, a longtime Fox News commentator who served in the Trump administration.

It wasn’t a deep fake. Harris said what she said, and the video doesn’t lie.

But a trusting reader would not realize that from the official transcript of the remarks published by the White House, which simply eliminates that embarrassing “North” from the sentence.

That’s a dishonest departure from the White House’s usual practice when it comes to Biden’s considerably more frequent gaffes. In those cases, the transcripts often come with crossed-out words and clarifying brackets that let the American public and the world know that the words of the president of the United States are often not worth the paper they’re not written on.

Meanwhile, mainstream media outlets are studiously silent on the Harris gaffe. Fox News reported it, of course, as well as conservative outlets such as The Washington Times and the New York Post, but don’t expect to see it mentioned on any of the non-Fox networks’ nightly news reports.

And that is exactly the opposite of what the reaction would have been if it had been, say, a Vice President Mike Pence who inadvertently cited a U.S. “alliance” with a crazed Hermit Kingdom that’s not only nuclear-armed and run by a dynastic scion of questionable sanity but periodically threatens the peace of its region and the world with ballistic-missile tantrums.

Then, Americans would hear about it, at length and ad nauseam.

Just like if Americans saw a President Donald Trump scanning a room in late September for a congresswoman who died in an early August car crash — the cries for removal under the 25th Amendment would be relentless.

Do you think most Americans trust the mainstream media?

But Harris is a creature of the Biden administration. And the Biden administration itself is a creature that has a bloodsucking symbiotic relationship with the mainstream media that helped create it.

So not only is the moment memory-holed by the White House transcript, it’s effectively ignored by the men and women most Americans depend on for their information.

But the reality is, there’s a president in the White House who can’t remember that his political comrades have passed out of this vale of tears, whose understudy is a vice president with a well-deserved reputation for spouting nonsense (when she’s not confusing friends and allies on international junkets).

And Americans are getting the truth about neither from the institutions and organizations they should be able to trust.

For a democratic republic that relies on an informed electorate for its very existence, that last part is the biggest worry of all.

UPDATE, Sept. 30, 2022: At the time this post was written, shortly before noon Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday, the White House transcript did not reflect the fact that Vice President Kamala had said, “So, the United States shares a very important relationship, which is an alliance with the Republic of North Korea.” The transcript now quotes Harris correctly, with the “North” crossed out.

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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
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American




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