OUR Great Communicator

I thought John McCain gave a gracious concession speech last night. I thought Barack Obama gave a brilliant victory speech.

Nevertheless, I agree with the old maxim, "Actions speak louder than words." I agree with those who say that Obama's actions as president over the next four or eight years will define his presidency far more than will the sum total of his speeches and press conferences. I predict that his actions will serve him and this nation well, even though I realize that my predictions aren't worth much. After all, I predicted after the Republican convention that McCain would win the presidency. But we will ultimately have to wait and see what Obama does and how we the American people and the rest of the world respond.

Yet, I know that, whatever else happens, I will now look forward to presidential speeches and press conferences, and I will no longer feel embarrassed when our president meets with foreign leaders and represents us on the world stage. And I will no longer cringe over our president's mispronunciation of the word nuclear.

This may not seem very important. Who cares whether our president acts and sounds like a simpleminded ignoramus? Who cares whether foreign leaders and peoples laugh at him and look down on him and on us for electing him not just once but twice?

I do.

Now we at the so-called "left" and center of the political spectrum have our own "Great Communicator," and while that doesn't mean everything to me, it sure means something.

McCain concedes

Obama Declares Victory

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.