Why Bush Sometimes Talks Real Good

If you tested the allegedly Yale-educated leader of the free world against a political science freshman from a random mediocre college, who do you suppose would have the better grasp of facts overall?

The only person in the country who probably can't guess the answer to that (even in two tries) is George Bush.

How do you keep a leader as verbally gaffe-prone as US President George W. Bush from making even more slips of the tongue? When Mr Bush addressed the UN General Assembly today, the White House inadvertently showed exactly how — with a phonetic pronunciation guide on the teleprompter to get him past troublesome names of countries and world leaders. The White House was left scrambling to explain after a marked-up draft of Bush's speech popped up briefly on the UN website as he delivered his remarks, giving a rare glimpse of the special guidance he gets for major addresses. It included phonetic spellings for French President Nicolas Sarkozy (sar-KO-zee), a friend, and Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe (moo-GAH-bee), a target of US human rights criticism. Pronunciations were also provided for Kyrgyzstan (KEYR-geez-stan), Mauritania (moor-EH-tain-ee-a) and the Zimbabwe capital Harare (hah-RAR-ray).

I pine for the days (early 2001) when you could still pretend our president was a vaguely amiable, slightly goofy stumblebum, instead of a full-on embarrassment capable of inducing worldwide groans that last seven-plus years.

Fourteen months to go.

UPDATE, Thursday: Reuters report that Bush are not a grammar wiz either.

Comments

[Billy Beck]

"Fourteen months to go."

...until the next bloody disaster.

Really lookin' forward to it.

[Jeff Wiebe]

I am **certainly** not a Bush supporter, but this particular thing doesn't seem a big deal to me. Back before the 2000 'election' even Bush supporters didn't claim he was a book-learnin' type. (His big attraction, as sold by Them, was he was a consensus builder, not a micromanager a la Gore. Obviously this wasn't any more reliable than most advertising.) Granted, we were used to Bill Clinton, who is a tremendously smart fellow in ways Dubya is not, and this kind of stuff clearly demonstrates that Bush has huge weaknesses. I just don't think needing a little help with pronunciation of some of these places and names is a big deal.

Now, it is embarrassing on the world stage, because we all feel that being able to reliably pronounce these words is critical. I don't think it actually *is* critical to governing well. Unfortunately, Bush can neither pronounce nor govern well, based on what he has actually done. But the pronunciation itself I don't think is a big deal.

It *is*, however, pretty pathetic when the strongest supportive thing I can think of to say for Bush is that it isn't that important that he can't pronounce things. Sheesh.

[Phelps]

Give me a break. Every newscaster sees the same thing. Radio copy is written this way. This is a non-story. Might as well claim that bloggers don't understand the internet because they use bookmarks.