NEW YORK (Reuters) - How do you keep a leader as verbally gaffe-prone as U.S. President George W. Bush from making even more slips of the tongue?
When Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, the White House inadvertently showed exactly how -- with a phonetic pronunciation guide on the teleprompter to get him past troublesome names of countries and world leaders.
The White House was left scrambling to explain after a marked-up draft of Bush's speech popped up briefly on the U.N. Web site as he delivered his remarks, giving a rare glimpse of the special guidance he gets for major addresses.
It included phonetic spellings for French President Nicolas Sarkozy (sar-KO-zee), a friend, and Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe (moo-GAH-bee), a target of U.S. human rights criticism.
Pronunciations were also provided for Kyrgyzstan (KEYR-geez-stan), Mauritania (moor-EH-tain-ee-a) and the Zimbabwe capital Harare (hah-RAR-ray).
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the draft, labeled the 20th version and complete with typos and speechwriters' cellphone numbers, had been turned over in advance to help U.N. interpreters who must simultaneously translate leaders' speeches into several languages.
The easy road would be to put (puh-REE-no) after Dana's name, but I prefer to pronounce it "milftastic", and my teevee screen has the dents where I've been grinding my loins to prove it.
Seriously, though -- Mauritania? Mugabe? I know I joke about it, but for Christ's sake, did he really just play pinball, snort coke and brand plebes all through college or what? Wasn't there a Will Ferrell skit back in 2000 about Bush showing up to the second debate with Gore, all proud of himself for saying "Obasanjo" correckly and all?
This is sad. If we're just going to have dopey airheads running things, let's at least make them hot dopey airheads. Americans are much less irritable when they have a good reason to spank their hapless monkeys.
1 comment:
He's coming back to a rate of one Bushism a day. Did you hear the one where he said "our childrens are making progress"?
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