Bush’s language gaffes go beyond nitpicking
For the past day-and-a-half, I have been browsing text and audio samples of Dubya. I think I have figured out exactly what’s wrong with his command of the English language. Sure, one can photocopy a Bush photo and add a tied tongue, paraphrase such sentences as: “I think the American people -I hope the American-I don’t think, let me-I hope the American people trust me-,” and reveal him conjuring up new names for noble gases such as Carbon Benoxide (with or without the [sic]), but here’s what I think the case is. He improvises. Now, I’m a bit obsessive compulsive when it comes to proper diction, like there is a certain way my mother talks which makes the accent on a particular word move slightly to the middle of it, and I can’t help but correct her. OJ becomes OJ, etc…
Bush’s language gaffes go beyond nitpicking. He has obviously not bothered to pay attention in school. Why would he have to? This is a man with an MBA who went to Harvard and Yale improvising the English language like a child pushing the big oh-five babbling to Bill Cosby on Kids Say the Dardest Things! .
Well, with the Bush’s riches and connections to the biggest ivory tower elite in the world, Bush, I guess, remained as educated as a child not much past 10.
Michael Moore digs in to Bush’s intelligence in more detail in his reactionary volume Stupid White Men. Moore contends that Dubya is a functional illiterate and jokes that Vice President Dick Cheney is “co-president” who reads Bush to sleep each night.
This is precisely why the system of checks and balances is an important part of the Constitution, and why, if Dubya is illiterate, it is good that he can’t read the instructions on how to release the nuclear launch codes.