I e-mailed Jacob Weisberg to ask what he thought was Bushist about yesterday’s Bushism of the Day, and he graciously responded:
The White House transcript didn’t have “to.” Hard to know what he actually said, but I’ll switch to the Post version to make it more readable. In any case, that is not the joke. I define Bushisms as things Bush says that are funny for whatever reason, not merely mistakes.
Hmm — that’s not how I had understood the series. Here’s the start of the Introduction from Weisberg’s Bushisms book:
The question I am most frequently asked about the Bushisms series is, “Do you really think the President of the United States is dumb?”
The short answer is yes.
The long answer is yes and no.
Dipping into this volume may leave the impression that George W. Bush is a simple dimwit. . . . If you don’t care to pursue the matter any further, that view will serve. . . .
In reality, however, there’s more to it. The assemblage of a presidential term’s worth of malapropisms, solecisms, gaffes, spoonerisms, and truisms — drawn together here from the best of Bushisms old and new — tends to imply that Bush’s lack of fluency in English is tantamount to an absence of intelligence. But as we all know from experience, the inarticulate can be shrewd, the fluent fatuous. In Bush’s case, the symptoms indicate a specific malady — some kind of language-skill deficit akin to dyslexia — that does not indicate a lack of mental capacity per se. . . .
But perhaps the Bushisms column has a broader mandate than the Bushisms book, or both are meant to be a mix not just of “malapropisms, solecisms, gaffes, spoonerisms, and truisms” — which are either mistakes (the first four) or vacuousness, which one might think of as a substantive mistake — but also just things that are “funny for whatever reason.”
Still, isn’t this line funny largely because it is taken out of context? Would it really be that funny if read with the surrounding lines, as I quote them above, and understanding that it was a response to a question about beef import policy?
And in any event, might it not be better for the Bushisms column to include links to the transcripts, so that readers can see for themselves what the context might be (especially if they assume that most Bushisms are indeed “malapropisms, solecisms, gaffes, spoonerisms, and truisms” rather than just “funny for whatever reason”)?
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