George W. Bushisms V
New Ways to Harm Our Country
Introduction
This year disaster struck the Bushisms project, when the President began speaking English. The phenomenon was first observed during the summer of 2004, in the midst of a presidential campaign that should have had George W. gibbering and sputtering the way he had in 2000. At the outset, the signs were subtle. Bush's "hunnert" flattened almost imperceptibly into an articulated "hundred," his "garmint" into a trisyllabic "government." During the debates, Bush sounded almost fluent. Though he flat ran out of things to say halfway into his first showdown with John Kerry, he hardly stumbled at all.
After the inauguration, the situation continued to deteriorate. Bush held a nearly flawless press conference. On a fence-mending trip to Europe, he delivered an eloquent speech citing Leibniz, Newton, and Camus, the latter's name pronounced without a final "s." I'd been noticing this trend with alarm when the Wall Street Journal weighed in with a front-pager on the subject. "He is enunciating more clearly and dotting his remarks with more literary references," a re ... read full excerpt from: George W. Bushisms V: New Ways to Harm Our Country ebook
