President Malaprop

Bush's latest bit of misspeaking is quite amusing. He tried to use a big word and then explain it to the audience, apparently thinking they would have no idea what it meant, but he fucked it up. He used "disassemble" instead of "dissemble". Personally, I find this has me flummoxed because Bush dissembles with much the same frequency of a hummingbird flapping its wings. Bush's handlers must have a thesaurus handy because I think this administration must hold the record for using the most synonyms for lying. They use these when describing the statements of others, of course, and resort to an arsenal of euphemisms when it comes to their own activities.

Bush comes across in the speech above just like a little kid eager to show off something he's learned in school. Does he really inspire confidence in anyone? As a speaker, he has all the pathos of a sheet of paper. What exactly is it about the man that is inspirational for those on the Right? Anyone can sit there in a classroom while our nation is under attack, right? The only speech of his that I've heard which didn't sound like a bland monotone "I-am-reading-from-a-teleprompter" was his first speech after 9/11. He sounded shaken, like he was speaking with real emotion. Fuck, Stephen Hawking's electronic voice box has more genuine rhetorical ability than Bush. I want to give Bush the benefit of the doubt, though. Malapropisms don't equate to being a poor president. I've read that Thomas Jefferson was a poor public speaker, for instance, and he makes Dubya look like a mental midget. But imagine you're back in the early 19th century and you're listening to Jefferson speak. He fumbles a bit and isn't overly articulate. What do you say? You'd probably say, "Well, I'll give him a pass on this one. Yeah, he's not a great public speaker but he wrote that Declaration of Independence hoolie." So what is it that Bush has said that gives certain people in this country such reassurance that things are in good hands?

OK, OK, I can see how he appeals to Calvinists with his mopey protestations that being president is such hard work. I see that. I'll give him that one. But come on everyone else! Hearing a spoiled rich kid piss and moan about "the elite"...? Hearing a man who made sure people were executed in Texas and who decided to invade Iraq speak about a "culture of life"...? Does no one else see the hypocrisy? And how about his disassembling? "Well, they've got WMDs." Um, no they don't. People were saying this before the war and no we've got the Downing Street memo. Whatever justification you can cook up for our presence in Iraq does not change the fact that Bush lied. How much cognitive dissonance reduction can folks on the Right handle before their brains are completely disassociated from reality? Even if you agree with the latest excuse that Bush and his cronies are proffering, shouldn't his lying be a source of consternation for Christians? Or is prevaricating now a Christian virtue?

I'd love for this country to have a president that I could trust, someone in whom I could find inspirational. But Bush has said precious little to me outside of saying that I'm a horrible person. It seems like almost every word out of his mouth is offensive to me: his religious bullshit, his anti-intellectualism, his disassembly, his hypocrisy, his hubris, his "I own sports teams and oil companies but I'm an ordinary guy" BS, his ability to denounce a genocide but not actually have any desire to step in and help, his inability to see the complexity of the world in anything other than black & white, etc. I take my statement back - he does inspire me. He inspired me to join the Freedom From Religion Foundation. He inspired me to fear his administration. He inspired me to not vote for him. Twice, in fact.