Can I Get a Speech Pathologist to Save our President?

Seriously, folks, I know people get upset when I call GWB an idiot, and I honestly want to believe he's not, but the press conference yesterday sort of gives it away. Flanked by Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, Bush managed to call them Ehud Omlet and Mahoomud Abbas. Now, we could just calll this a gaffe, and we could agree that it isn't substantive enough to use as a litmus test for the President's intelligence, but it's not as if this hasn't happened before. Remember when the press discovered that GWB had phonetic spellings of names and places in his notes? I do understand that there are about 200 countries in the world and no one should be expected to know all the leaders of all the countries, but at the same time, he's had almost eight years, and isn't this kind of his job? (I average 100 students per semester and I know their names by week four. To my knowledge, none of my students are running countries.)

However, granting that there are lots of difficult names, you'd think the names of the Prime Minister of our principal ally in the Middle East and their chief nemesis would be names that might be used occasionally in the White House. That's fair, right? How is it that the "leader of the free world" can't pronounce two of the most important names in world politics? Let's stop pretending the man is not in way over his head. After the famous Bush/Gore debate when Gore slaughtered Bush, Roger Ebert—yes, that Roger Ebert—said Bush reminded him of a bad student faking his way through a midterm oral exam. Ebert, who was a professor before he became a writer/reviewer, was the only one in the MSM with the courage to say so at the time. We should have listened.

Comments

[Elinor]

Reminds me of that skit on SNL where Condi was coaching W on names of leaders and their respective countries (Ah, back when Will Ferrell was still there.)
Don't you think they do that regularly but he messes up anyway?

[cheek]

There are education studies that show mispronouncing a kid's name on the first day of school effectively guarantees that the kid won't actually listen to you again for the first six weeks of class. The kid assumes instinctively that you don't care. I have a feeling that world leaders have the same reaction to our president, and I'm pretty sure they're right.

[Zossima]

Sadly, just like we're now hearing the confessions from people like McClellan regarding the lies and bad decisions, we will soon spend years enduring the tomes of ex-aides revealing just how petulant and stupid this man is. I still hold out hope that his dad is going to kick his ass.