Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush was blasted by the New York Times for allegedly dismissing the mass killings by a gunman at an Oregon community college as "stuff happens." The Times then invited President Obama to lambaste Bush's out-of-context two words in a Saturday print story. (Meanwhile, true Democratic gaffe-masters like Joe Biden get an "off-the-cuff" pass from the newspaper.)
Reporters Jonathan Martin and Matt Flegenheimer filed "Jeb Bush Is Criticized for Saying ‘Stuff Happens’ in Reaction to Shootings," on nytimes.com Friday afternoon. Although the Times accused the former Florida governor of having "invited" the firestorm with his comments at a forum in South Carolina, it was the Times and other outlets (including the Washington Post) that poured the gasoline by using the wildly out-of-context quote to paint Bush as being flippant about the Oregon tragedy:
Jeb Bush invited a firestorm on Friday by saying that “stuff happens” in reference to renewed calls for legislative action after tragedies like the mass shooting in Oregon.
“I had this challenge as governor because we had -- look, stuff happens,” he said at a forum in South Carolina. “There’s always a crisis and the impulse is always to do something, and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.”
The inelegant phrase immediately set off a wave of criticism from observers suggesting he was playing down the scourge of gun violence and the tragedy on Thursday, in which a gunman killed nine people at a community college in Roseburg, Ore.
Mr Bush, taking questions from the state’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, was speaking about a pattern of proposing legislative responses that he said did not halt the tragedies they were meant to stop.
Asked afterward about the “stuff happens” comment, Mr. Bush said, “it wasn’t a mistake,” and requested that a reporter point out “what I said wrong.”
“Things happen all the time,” Mr. Bush said. “Things. Is that better?”
Asked what he meant, Mr. Bush said he was talking more generally about the tendency to pass laws in response to tragic events.
....
Mr. Bush said he was not referring specifically to Oregon when he said “stuff happens.”
President Obama was quickly invited by the media to pile on, and the Times dutifully relayed Obama's contempt, which turned into a full story in Saturday's paper.
The Washington Post updated its own blog post on the controversy with the full 700-word transcript (reprinted below) of the exchange that provided much needed context. But the post began by also unleashing an aggrieved Obama on Jeb, based on the out-of-context quote.
Jeb Bush drew a sharp rebuke from President Obama on Friday after the Republican presidential candidate shrugged off any need for government action in the wake of the massacre of nine people at a community college in Oregon.
“Look, stuff happens,” Mr. Bush, the former Republican governor of Florida, said at a campaign event in South Carolina. “There’s always a crisis, and the impulse is always to do something and it’s not always the right thing to do.”
Mr. Obama, who in remarks the night before had denounced Congress and the entire American political system for what he called its numbness to repeated gun massacres, responded: “The American people should hear that and make their own judgments based on the fact that every couple of months, we have a mass shooting. They can decide whether they consider that ‘stuff happens.’ ”
