Any politician running for president could submit for public consideration a 500-page document proposing the most deranged policy on earth, and it wouldn’t summon as much outcry as a single gaffe. This is because gaffes are also, conveniently, soundbites; it’s also because gaffes provide the opportunity to charge that a politician is not only wrong-minded, but stupid and incompetent. This is true across the political spectrum, and no politician or party is burdened by our vulturous lust for gaffes any more than the next.

So it was, for instance, when Hillary Clinton seemed to say in an Iowa town hall last month that she would close down more than 50 percent of America’s public schools—and then perhaps 50 percent of that culled herd, and so on and so forth, Zeno’s-paradox style, until not a single American school remained open. Was this really what Clinton said? Not exactly. She said, “Now, I wouldn’t keep any school open that wasn’t doing a better-than-average job,” referring to a unique provision in Iowa state law that she went on to specify she would have little, if any, federal control over as president.

A fair-minded person might wonder if Clinton’s remarks on Iowa schools reflect her views on education in a more cosmic sense. This would at least be a smarter line of inquiry than the one concerning an obviously ridiculous plan to rid the nation of schooling, and a more revealing one to boot. And the answer—crucially—wouldn’t necessarily exonerate her. Clinton’s relationship with teachers’ unions as first lady of Arkansas was frictious thanks in part to a teacher-testing bill that irked the state’s educators; but she has since earned endorsements from major teachers’ unions like the National Education Association, and earned the ire of the school-choice crowd with disparaging remarks about public charter schools. Her record, in other words, is mixed: The opposite of a gaffe is not a remark that everyone likes and agrees on, but a clearly understood and fairly interpreted remark.

Today’s gaffe frenzy came to us courtesy of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who has never been known for a particularly delicate or subtle verbal style. Speaking last night to Rachel Maddow on her eponymous MSNBC show, Sanders fielded a question about why he hasn’t earned the endorsements of organizations like Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign, and others. Here’s what he said:

“I would love to have the endorsement of every progressive organization in America. We’re very proud to have received recently the endorsement of MoveOn.org. We’ve received the endorsement Democracy for America. These are grassroots organizations representing millions of workers. … What we are doing in this campaign, it just blows my mind every day because I see it clearly, we’re taking on not only Wall Street and economic establishment, we’re taking on the political establishment. ... So, I have friends and supporters in the Human Rights Fund and Planned Parenthood. But, you know what? Hillary Clinton has been around there for a very, very long time. Some of these groups are, in fact, part of the establishment.”

Sanders was instantly taken to mean that Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign are part of the nefarious political cabal he intends to dismantle; the Human Rights Campaign characterized Sanders’s remarks as an attack, and Planned Parenthood protested that it cannot be a part of the “establishment” since “we fight like hell to protect women’s health.”