Forgive me if my thoughts seem a bit jumbled today; between dealing with a neighbor who insists on sharing his tunes through the open window of his truck parked in his driveway (why???), lingering pain in my left wrist and arm, and the post-vaccination wallop, I've been a little at sea.

Still, I have thoughts.

Context, or the lack of it. I often remind that context is very important when judging statements made by political figures, as opposing politicians have the tendency to attempt to strip the surrounding context to provide a "gotcha" moment. This paper's John Brummett, in examining the context of Mitt Romney's "gotcha" of Barack Obama's "you didn't build that" quote in 2012, raised the specter of the long-ago gubernatorial campaign pitting Sheffield Nelson against Bill Clinton in which Nelson, late in the campaign, ran an ad using Clinton saying the words "raise and spend" completely out of context. I've used that example myself a few times, as well as the Nancy Pelosi quote heading into the vote on the Affordable Care Act (used to imply that none of the representatives had actually read it because it was being rushed through, which wasn't really the case).

The point is that opponents can easily take something you've said, divorce it from everything else that was said, and make it........

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