I misspoke, you made a mistake, they’re a bunch of liars

Perhaps related to Unspeak, and an example of it, is the phenomenon of Misspeak. Increasingly, we hear politicians who are caught out in deceptions, fantasies or bullshit say, in answer, simply: “I misspoke”. Thus John Mccain, on how he could have imagined that Iran was arming “Al Qaeda”:

I just simply misspoke when I said Al-Qaeda.

And Hillary Clinton was forced to admit that she was not actually being shot at by snipers when she landed in Bosnia in 1996:

So I misspoke.

It is useful, to say one “misspoke”. You acknowledge that what you said was absolute balls, but the fault is not your own, as it would be if you had lied or been wrong. No, the fault is somehow in the faculty of speech itself, something going wrong in the course of that complex magic between brain, lip and others’ ears. Lying (if that’s what it is) is Unspoken as a brief blip of dysphasia. Here’s an illuminating elaboration of what is being claimed:

Adrianne Marsh, spokeswoman for Sen. Claire McCaskill, has told several news organizations her boss “misspoke” Wednesday when she said Sen. Barack Obama was the first black figure “to come to the American people not as a victim but as a leader.”
...
“This is a classic case where Claire simply misspoke,” Marsh said in a prepared statement. “She’s sorry it came out wrong.”

http://unspeak.net/misspeak/

“The Nixon Administration has developed a new language—a kind of Nix-speak. Government officials are entitled to make flat statements one day, and the next day reverse field with the simple phrase, “I misspoke myself.” White House Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler enlarged the vocabulary last week, declaring that all of Nixon’s previous statements on Watergate were “inoperative.” Not incorrect, not misinformed, not untrue—simply inoperative, like batteries gone dead.”