Bush-ism

This entry probably has no place in this East Asian blog. But I simply cannot resist.

Am currently reading Frank Bruni's Ambling Into History - The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush (Harper Collins, 2002), a book I paid 50 cents for at the used book section of the Rockville Library in Maryland.

The book gives a private glimpse of Bush behind the scenes, "a portrait that is sometimes intimate, sometimes skeptical, but always human."

But most hilarious were the bloopers, or in Bruni's words "a bumper crop of bloopers" made by Bush.

"Potential missile launches" became "potential menshul losses".

"Tactical nuclear weapons" morphed into "tacular nucular weapons."

He sympathized with the difficulties that some Americans faced in trying "to put food on your family." He believed that the country should pursue free-trade policies that knocked down not just tariffs and barriers but also "bariffs and terriers."

As Bruni noted, "the spaniels and retrievers could only wonder if they would be next."

Bush called the Greeks "Grecians" and the people in Kosovo "Kosovians."

He said "vile" instead of "vital" when he spoke about hemisphere.

When he described his approach to the economy as an effort to "make the pie higher", a "theoretically sensible strategy if he was thinking in terms of meringues or souffles" quipped Bruni.

During a visit to an elementary school that was celebrating "Perseverance Month", Bush kept saying "preservation", eliciting the remark that a presidential candidate quickly learns: "You've got to preserve", mused Bruni, who added "but only if he plans to take homemade jams and jellies with him on the road."

And instead of saying "subliminal" Bush uttered "subliminable."

Bush also reportedly said this - "People are going to resist the flows of capital the likes of which we've never seen before, which is going to create tension - will create a sense of uncertainty on the one hand, but uncertainty on the other." Hmm.

And in a speech at Reagan International Airport which had finally reopened two weeks after the September 11th attacks, Bush said that "ticket counters and airplanes will fly out of Reagan airport."