Bush George Walker - George W. Bushisms: the Slate book of the accidental wit and wisdom of our forty-third president

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Copyright 2001 by Jacob Weisberg All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-2376-8
ISBN-10: 0-7432-2376-4 INTRODUCTION Collecting these utterances by our now president over the past year and a bit, Ive found myself returning time and again to the same question: What exactly is wrong with this guy? The most widely publicized clinical evaluation came from Gail Sheehy, the famed psycho-journalist. Sheehy wrote a lengthy article in Vanity Fair proposing that George W. Bush suffers from undiagnosed dyslexia. Within a few hours of the pieces publication, the Republican nominee had responded, The woman who knew that I had dyslexiaI never interviewed her.

People who read this quote in the newspaper might have thought the Texas governor was kidding around. Reporters like me who were surrounding him on an airport tarmac in California when he made the remark knew that, alas, he was not trying to be funny. That comment notwithstanding, I dont think Bush is dyslexic. When confronted with a TelePrompTer, Bush squints, knits his eyebrows, and peers into it like an admiral trying to discern landfall in the twilight. Yet he has no special trouble rendering his speechwriters words in the proper order as they scroll past his eyeballs. The trouble arises when Bush isnt reading what someone else has written for him, and comes up with stuff like I understand small business growth.

I was one or What a good man the Englers are! Dana Milbank of The Washington Post identified another possible pathology. Bush, Milbank suggested, might have contracted a mild case of apraxia. According to Lyn Goldberg, a speech pathologist at George Washington University, victims of apraxia have trouble selecting, timing and ordering sounds, which causes them to shorten words (as in vile for viable or subsidiation for subsidization). But this cant be it either. Bush just as often reinterprets familiar words by making them longer (as in subliminable or analyzation). And apraxia, which is often caused by a stroke, is a serious disorder that disrupts neural programming and often leaves its patients unable to speak at all.

Bush has not been afflicted to this degree, though at times he does appear headed in that direction. Could the Man from Midland simply be a bit thick? Texas troublemakers like Paul Begala and Molly Ivins tend to favor this view, expressing it in the sort of colorful metaphor for which their state is known. Our president aint the brightest bulb on the tree. He aint the sharpest tool in the shed, either. He may be a few fries short of a Happy Meal, etc., etc. Some of Bushs comments do lend support to this interpretation.

Im thinking of Bushs accusation that Democrats treat Social Security like its some kind of federal program, and the postelection civics lesson in which he reminded us, The legislatures job is to write law. Its the executive branchs job to interpret law. Under the educational standards Bush has supported in Texas, hed be doing eighth grade for the thirty-ninth time. Still, I think we have to admit that Dubya is no Dan Quayle. In fact, hes much funnier. George W. George W.

Bushs father George H. W. Bush wasnt dumb, but he sits beside Eisenhower and Coolidge in our pantheon of verbally challenged presidents. When Bush I extemporized, he would dispense with pronouns and verbs (message: I care), temper any expression of feeling with words like stuff and thing (the vision thing) and often break in mid-thought to accept another incoming mental message, a tendency my friend Tim Noah dubbed his call-waiting mode. No reporter present that day in New Hampshire will ever forget H.W.s great reelection riff: Remember Lincoln, going to his knees in times of trial and the Civil War and all that stuff. You cant be.

And we are blessed. So dont feel sorry fordont cry for me, Argentina. Weve got problems out there and I am blessed by good health, strong health. Jeez, you get the flu, and they make it into a federal case. Anyway, that goes with the territory. It was words like these that first provoked me to coin the term Bushism a decade ago, on the model of the Reaganism of the Week that used to appear in Lou Cannons column in The Washington Post. Could there be some defect in the Bush language genes? In his book The Language Instinct, Stephen Pinker of MIT describes a study done by a linguist named Myrna Gopnik about a group of subjects she calls Family K.

While otherwise normally literate and intelligent, the Ks cannot make their subjects and verbs agree in number. The boys eat four cookie, one will say. Is our children learning? another will ask. Professor Gopnik refers to this inherited problem as specific language impairment, or SLI. When I came across this passage in Pinkers book, I thought Id made a great discovery. The Bushes were Family K! In fairness, though, George the father doesnt suffer from subject-verb agreement difficulties.

And George the son has some language gaps apparently unrelated to SLI. They are, to name just a few, Archie Bunkeresque malapropisms (I am a person who recognizes the fallacy of humans); spoonerisms (terriers and barriffs); positive-negative confusions (If Im president... were going to have gag orders); truisms (I think we agree, the past is over); redundancies (finality has finally happened); familiar expressions, often dealing with eating, blackjacked and rendered senseless (make the pie higher, put food on your family); not to mention moments of sheer goofball exuberance that rival Dads finest (I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully). While the possibility that someone will positively identify the presidents pathology remains open, Ive become skeptical about finding a single key. My current explanation draws on the nature and the culture of the Bushes. You start with the father tongue, the Cliffs Notes version of The Preppie Handbook. Marinate it in the refinery haze of Midland, Texas.

Then return east for one of the fanciest and least effective educations ever attempted. Stir briskly and release under pressure. What you get are the gems of accidental wit that follow. For many of them I have to thank the readers of Slate.com, who contributed voluminously during the course of the campaign, as well the boys and girls on the Bush bus. You know who you are. Jacob Weisberg