Wednesday, July 10, 2002

Bushisms



A quote from President Bush published recently:



"And so, in my State of the — my State of the Union — or state — my speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, speech to the nation — I asked Americans to give 4,000 years — 4,000 hours over the next — the rest of your life — of service to America. That's what I asked — 4,000 hours."



Leftists, especially Noam Chomsky, for example, often sound like this when they talk informally. So did Clinton on occasion. So would almost anyone. However, in the case of Chomsky and Clinton, the media always does their subject the courtesy of editing his responses so that they read in a coherent manner. They respect Chomsky and they buy into the idea that he's brilliant even on those days that he's sounding like an imbecile, and they want his comments to read like he's intelligent.



By contrast, the left has taken to quoting Bush verabim when he speaks off the cuff in an informal situation so that it makes him sound stupid. They simply don't extend the same courtesy to Bush that they do to people who's politics they like.



That's one of the reasons that these quotes from Bush, collecting Bushisms, and the like do not impress many people. They know what the game is. They don't regard the news media as being credible, and they don't regard the left as credible.