Quote of the Day

Let Michael Moore point out, entirely correctly, the close ties between the Saudis and the Bush family, and he’s blasted as a crazy conspiracy theorist. On the other hand, let Donald Luskin suggest, in 2004, that George Soros is planning to engineer a financial crisis to defeat Bush, and he gets to publish front-page articles in the Washington Post Outlook section declaring that there isn’t a recession.
--Paul Krugman

Is He Serious?

One can have rhetorical skills, like Obama, which conceal an intellect that is mediocre, or poor rhetorical skills, like President Bush, and have a superior IQ.
--Gagdad Bob

Some Important Questions for President Bush

There are several questions I'd love for some intrepid reporter to ask President Bush at one of his press conferences. They might seem like trivial questions, but I don't think they are. These questions are:

Why, after being president of the United States for over seven years, do you still mispronounce "nuclear" by saying "nucular"? After all this time, do you still not know the proper pronunciation of this extremely important word, or do you know it but choose to go on mispronouncing it on purpose? If you still don't know how to pronounce it, why is that? If you DO know how to pronounce it but deliberately mispronounce it anyway, why do you do THAT? What do you think it says about the president of the world's military and economic superpower that he still mispronounces "nuclear" after more than seven years in office?

If a reporter from a major media source were to ask President Bush such questions, I'm quite sure it would be the last questions he or she ever asked a president or anyone else as a prominent reporter, Helen Thomas possibly excepted. But what a great way to go out in style!

I'm surprised that somebody somewhere hasn't asked President Bush these things, or, at least, that the public hasn't made a bigger deal of his persistent mispronunciation than it has. When people do talk about it, they tend to treat is as some kind of amusing joke. But is it a joking matter?

If President Bush REALLY doesn't know how to pronounce "nuclear" after all these years as president and after all the comic impressions of him mispronouncing it, what DOES this say about him? Does it say that he's stupid? Some might say so. But one can have cognitive deficits in some areas without being globally stupid. Perhaps President Bush, despite his Yale MBA, is linguistically or verbally challenged in some respects but not intellectually deficient overall. Yet, how verbally challenged would one have to be to occupy President Bush's position on the world stage and not know how to pronounce "nuclear" after all this time? It seems to me that someone THAT verbally challenged has no business being president (or possessing a Yale MBA).

However, as much as I think that George Bush has no business being president, I don't think he's THAT verbally challenged. I think that he's almost certainly aware of his mispronunciation but chooses to keep doing it anyway. Now why would he do this? I'm not a psychologist and don't even play one on this blog, but I'm nevertheless going to take the liberty of offering a layman's hypothesis of my own.

President Bush believes that being a real man means never having to admit that you're wrong. That is, admitting or doing anything to acknowledge that you're wrong is a sign of weakness, and real men aren't weak and must avoid appearing so at all costs. They "stay the course" even when they're wrong, and even when they know they're wrong, whether they're wrong in their pronunciation of "nuclear" or about our invading and staying in Iraq.

Of course, I don't think President Bush believes that our involvement with Iraq is wrong. But because he seems to believe that real men stick with what they start no matter what, he won't even allow himself to entertain for one nanosecond the possibility that our involvement in Iraq was and is a terrible mistake. Real men don't do such things, even if it maims and kills thousands and costs trillions to keep on doing what we're doing.

All I can say is that if THIS is what it means to be a real man, God help us if we have any more real men occupying the White House in these perilous times! If nothing else, it looks as though we can at least be assured that our next president will pronounce "nuclear" properly and maybe, just maybe this is a sign of better things to come.

Do You Agree?

"This guy is a Yale undergraduate and history major, a Harvard MBA, and one of the best-read, most thoughtful people I know. Now, I know he likes to play sort of the Midland/West Texas -- but he is smart."
--Karl Rove on George Bush

Who Would Rank Lower Than Bush?

I mean, who would you rank lower than George W. Bush? Nixon got in trouble for illegally wiretapping Democratic headquarters; Bush is illegally wiretapping the entire country. Nixon opened up relations with the Chinese; Bush let them poison your dog. Herbert Hoover sat on his ass through four years of calamity, but he was an actual engineer. If someone told him about global warming, he would have understood it before the penguins caught on fire. Ulysses Grant was a miserable drunk, but at least he didn't trade booze for Jesus and embolden the snake handlers -- he did the honorable thing and stayed a miserable drunk. Grant let his cronies loot the republic, but he won his civil war.

--Bill Maher

A Tribute to Gerald Ford

I was in my early 20's when Gerald Ford was president. In those days, I hated the Republican Party, despised politics in general, and paid as little attention to either as I could. But I used to laugh at Chevy Chase's merciless mockery of Ford on Saturday Night Live, and I didn't approve of Ford's pardoning of Richard Nixon. Yet, I never felt the animosity if not hatred toward him that I later did for Ronald Reagan and George Bush Jr. Gerald Ford was a man you just couldn't hate.

I never thought much about why at the time. But in the wake of his recent death and with what I would like to think is at least a little more maturity than I had over three decades ago, I've thought about it quite a lot. I've come to the conclusion that Gerald Ford was one of the most unassuming, genial, straightforward, commonsensical, and just plain decent men to serve in high political office during my lifetime. As Dick Cheney pointed out in his eulogy, Ford was no philosopher-statesman, but he was exactly what our nation needed when circumstances forced him into a position he hadn't anticipated and probably never really wanted. And if he didn't perform his duties with dazzling oratory and brilliance, at least he did so with genuine modesty and integrity and without the Machiavellian artifice so characteristic of politicians. He did what he thought was right. Not "right" in terms of political ideology, but right in terms of solid moral sensibilities.

In retrospect, I believe that he not only thought he was but also that he actually WAS morally right to pardon Nixon rather than allow this country, already bruised and demoralized by the Vietnam War, Watergate, and a faltering economy, to glumly wallow in a protracted trial that would, at best, have proven what we already knew and what the pardon itself implied. Ironically, doing the right thing may well have cost Ford victory in the 1976 election, and cynical politicians would no doubt cite this as good reason to elevate personal expediency over selfless rectitude in one's political acts. But am I naive to think that if we had more politicians at every level who are more intent on doing right than on getting re-elected, we and our children and they and their children might inhabit a better nation and world than we all do? And isn't it likely that Gerald Ford was able to look back on his life when he came to its end and feel a sense of glowing satisfaction and pride over the essential integrity and goodness with which he conducted his private and publicly political life that few politicians will ever know?

I don't mourn the death of Gerald Ford. He lived a remarkably full life of 93 years as high-school and college football star, Yale Law School graduate, valiant naval officer during World War II, distinguished congressman and House Minority Leader, Vice President, President, elder statesman, and loving and devoted family man. But I have great admiration and respect for the kind of man he was, and I believe that the world of politics and the world at large is diminished by his passing. He may have been a "Ford, not a Lincoln," but what a rugged, reliable, and quietly capable old Ford he was.