Press and Rivals Playing Gotcha with Politicians' Comments

Did you ever see the 1970 movie Patton, starring George S. Scott as the brash World War II general?  There were scenes in it where he is allowing the press to ask him questions, and his off-the-cuff, careless answers are almost always taken out of context to paint him as a brutish villain who even sympathized with the Nazis...nothing could have been further from the truth.  I remember this film because I see something going on nowadays...not only with President Trump, whose offhand remarks have become his trademark, but also about politicians on the Democratic Party side.  Leftist freshman representative  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, already known for her flamboyant rhetoric and an outspoken critic of former vice-president Joe Biden on several issues, was recently asked in an interview a pointed question about his well-documented tendency in the past to get all touchy-feely-huggy out in public and that it disturbed some women. AOC...as she is commonly referred to...responded in what I thought was a restrained and respectful way toward Biden. Yet the later headlines made it look as if she were trying to resurrect the issue.  Biden was also criticized by rival Democratic candidate Cory Booker for having commented that even back when there were segregationist senators they were all able to get along better with each other than the broken, polarized situation in that body today...Booker failed to see the point of Biden's argument and instead accused him of praising segregationists.  Biden then angrily replied that he never had a racist bone in his body. Ocasio-Cortez then commented that it was Biden who owed Booker an apology for defending himself against his accusation.  Trump, of course, gets no respect and is even ridiculed for comments he makes that are obviously taken far out of context.  For example, he tweeted that the moon was part of Mars and the jokesters went wild with his supposedly incredible ignorance when all he was saying was that going back to the moon was to be seen as part of the plan of eventually going to Mars...to laugh at him for this reveals one's own stupidity, in my opinion.  Donald Trump may not like Bob Woodward's book Fear, which described the workings of the beginning of his presidency, but it fairly showed that he is tends to impulsively change his mind a lot, has a very short attention span, and is pretty sloppy with his speech and Twitter...all making it very easy for his critics to come up with material.  It's no secret that I dislike our current president...and I'm not all that fond of AOC or Biden, either.   But when they express themselves I try to understand the main ideas they are trying to impart and not just play "gotcha" while trying to distort their message into one that politically harms them...