Obama/Osama: Chris Matthews Steps In It

If you're MSNBC's Chris Matthews, you could try to mend fences with Hillary Clinton by trying to cover her fairly and without malice. Or you could just equate her opponent to a famous terrorist. Hey, everyone's doing it.

Via TVNewser:

It's one thing to mix up two similar sounding names. But substituting a photo of Osama for one of Obama -- can that still be an innocent mistake? Once again, I asked Michael Erard, author of Um: Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean.

"I am speculating, but I can imagine some low-level producer going through a file of stock images arranged by the subject's name and throwing it into whatever display program they use without checking the image first," he says. "That would make it a slip, though a slip of the eye, followed by a dose of laziness, poor judgment, inexperience, or all three. The point is, the confusion is still linguistic, not political or psychological. You can see Matthews gulp and pause once he realizes what the graphic is."

For proof that it doesn't require hatred of Democrats to confuse Obama and Osama, Erard points to this video: