Monday, January 24, 2000

Bushisms / finger shots

One of those creepy 107-year old Japanese twins died. Aren't they the ones who used to call Mothra?

Letter in the Sunday NY Times about Microsoft's market value now equaling Spain's GDP: "Hey, I've been to Spain. Windows 98 works better."

So the Chechens didn't really capture that general after all. What's the point of even making up an easily checkable lie? At least when the US military lied about the performance of Patriot missiles or Sudanese chemical plants or who they were killing in Kosovo, it usually took weeks or months to find out, by when it's evidently ancient history (god knows what you call the sort of history I work on).

I'd been dismayed by the German SPD's incompetence in office, its squabbling and its inability to win a single state election. I figured all those years out of power would take a lot of time in office to overcome, learning the job and so on, and they didn't look like having it. Thank god for financial scandals, huh? The Hesse elections might even have to be re-run since the CDU spent illegal money. And how about Kohl defying the law and his own party, which is threatening to sue him, by citing his "honor." His honor is a pretty small thing to hide behind, and he's such a great big fat thing. The worry, though, is that the CDU could break up or be too badly depressed in subsequent elections, to the benefit of the far-right racist parties.

In my continuing quest to bring you the latest news of Shrub's inability to speak the English language, here are excerpts from the London Times:
Ben Macintyre reports on the mangled messages from the Republican front-runner

GEORGE W. BUSH had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand until suddenly, in the middle of a riff about free trade, he appeared to launch an unprovoked attack on a species of small dog.

The world will be a better place, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination said, when "all the terriers are torn down".


Mr Bush is also prey to what might be called the jammed compact-disc stutter, when he gets impaled on a single word. "We must all hear the universal call to like your neighbour just like you like to be liked yourself." Then there is the grand word glitch, triggered by his occasional forays into the deeper bits of the dictionary. Three times in two days, Mr Bush said that, if elected, he would never "obsfucate". It is a measure of the Bush charm that when the candidate finds himself up a blind verbal alley being assaulted by his own syntax, he is as amused anyone else.

"Bumble through OK?" he grins.

After more than seven years of syntactical precision by Bill Clinton, it is refreshing to have the Bush-isms back, and a candidate who does not obsfucate but say things how they are is.

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