Under intense fire after being nailed for exaggerating his depiction of a 2004 pleasure vacation to Cuba as a “humanitarian trip”, scandal-plagued GOP candidate Mike Erickson is firing back at the media, claiming that the voyage was “one-third” humanitarian:
Erickson maintained on Monday that he brought 20 boxes of medical supplies and delivered them to clinics over two days. He estimated he spent about “one-third” of his time in Cuba doing that.
The other two-thirds, he said, included casual conversations with regular Cubans, whether at a restaurant or on the streets.
“I did a lot of that in that two-thirds. Every time I was at dinner, I talked to the waiters and waitresses and, ‘Hey, you’re young, what do you want to do in life?” he said.
“The other two-thirds wasn’t just leisure, or just whatever it was. It was constantly always asking, ‘Hey, what’s going on in your country here?'”
He called The Oregonian’s story inaccurate and denied ever going marlin fishing, dove hunting, shooting any kind of animal or smoking an entire cigar.
Yup, stop the presses: Mike Erickson did not smoke a cigar from tip to tip while in Cuba.
You almost have to give Erickson credit for taking Clintonian parsing to new heights.
PS: What about cock-fighting, Mike?
Flip him over, he’s done.
This is the same guy who said he didn’t know what cocaine looked like and while he may have transported his girlfriend to an abortion (although he kind of denies that) he didn’t pay for it.
Erickson, king of the partial denial….
“Every time I was at dinner, I talked to the waiters and waitresses and, ‘Hey, you’re young, what do you want to do in life?”
Several connotations to that particular quote. The most generous being that maybe he thinks he is running in South Florida rather than Oregon and was on a fact-finding trip.
Sending medical supplies to Cuba doesn’t even make much sense. They actually have a good healthcare system with a higher doctor to patient ratio than we do. I believe they also have a higher life expectancy. Cuba even offered to send aid workers to our country following Katrina to help. It’s no coincidence than Cuba usually has far fewer fatalities than we do with hurricanes. But hey, since when have facts mattered to a lot of republicans.