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Understatement of the Week: J.Hickenlooper

By ANTHONY HALL, United Press International
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You take the easy ones sometimes.

The understatement of the week comes from Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who first uttered the week's best gaffe, when he introduced his lieutenant governor to an audience of school children as a "sex star."

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The governor quickly said, "Oops." In the first place, "I didn't mean 'sex symbol,' I meant 'rock star,' but I said 'sex star,'" Hickenlooper admitted.

Sometimes your tongue just betrays where your mind might be. In any case, the comment was supposed to have been sarcastic in the first place, Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia explained, telling the press later, "I'm really a pretty straight-arrow, boring kind of guy."

In response to that, "He calls me a rock star a lot," Garcia said.

So it was all pretty harmless.

"It was a poorly designed effort to pay compliments to Joe," the governor said -- and all the more out of place given the ill-fated introduction was delivered at a literacy event at the Colfax Elementary School in Denver.

The Understatement of the Week?

"As I say to my wife all the time, there's always 5 feet between me and disaster. That's the distance between my foot and my mouth," the governor said.

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