|
< < <
Date Index > > > |
G. W. Bush: "D'you have blacks too?" (Der Spiegel) and other stories ;) by Daniel 03 June 2002 19:33 UTC |
< < <
Thread Index > > > |
|
OK people, I confess that at first, I was under the
impression George W. Bush (a.k.a. Dubya) was not a tremendously bright man. But
then i heard about his academic background, i was a bit more reassured... After
all, he DOES hold a BA from Yale, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, two
of the finest teaching institutions in the US of A. And suddenly, i get a couple
of articles detailing his speech blunders. What is more, despite usually being
compiled by blatantly biased people, the vast majority of the quotes CAN be
traced to a recorded speech by the POTUS.
Which then leaves me wondering: are we to be extremely
concerned that Bush is seriously overwhelmed with work and therefore if sinking
lower and lower into stress-induced verbal dementia? Does he suffer from a rare
and undocument form of aphasia? Or, equally grave, are we to worry that the
often titled "most powerful man on the planet" is blatantly innarticulate,
lacking in the most basic general knowledge, and sometimes just plain dumb? Or -
and this is the most frightening hypothesis of all - that Yale and Harvard, once
the proud torch-beares or higher learning in the US have come to such low
standards as to award degrees to G. W. Bush?
What are the implications for the US and for the world at
large of both these "minor [ and sometimes major] slips", and of "what lies
beneath"?
While we ponder such questions, I offer some verbatim proof of
my claims for all to muse, as well as some analysis of them by credible news
sources. (No, i have not tracked down ALL of them to the original source,
especially when it comes to the lose quotations. Should anyone care to do so, i
would very much appreciate being notified if any of the quotes here presented is
NOT accurate or plain false)
Apologies for any cross-posting occuring.
Best regards,
Daniel Pinéu
danielfrp@hotmail.com BUSH'S GENERAL EDUCATION
Do you have blacks in Brazil?
It is said, that, before September 11, George W. Bush thought
the Taliban were a Bavarian brass band. Now, thanks to his comprehensive
knowledge, the most powerful man in the world has got into hot water
again.
Washington - It was Condoleezza Rice, national security
advisor, who helped her boss out of the embarassing situation. During a
conversation between the two presidents, George W. Bush, 55, (USA) and Fernando
Henrique Cardoso, 71, (Brazil), Bush bewildered his colleague with the question
"Do you have blacks, too?"
Rice, 47, noticing how astonished the Brazilian was, saved the
day by telling Bush "Mr. President, Brazil probably has more blacks
than the USA. Some say it's the Country with the most blacks outside
Africa." Later, the Brazilian president Cardoso said: regarding Latin
America, Bush was still in his "learning phase".
http://gwbush.com/copies/trans.html (Der
Spiegel, 19/5/2001, translated)
Some of the latest by George W. Bush
Selected Quotes from DubyaSpeak ( http://www.dubyaspeak.com/ ) - Huge
quotation database, including often repeated mistakes.
DUBYA: Decisive ally? Ally? Decisive ally? Of course, Jacques Chirac. I -- listen, thank you for the trick question. Let me talk about this ally. The phone rang the day after the attack -- the day of the attack. I can't remember exactly when, but it was immediately. And he said, "I'm your friend." On this continent, France takes the lead in helping to hunt down people who want to harm America and/or the French, or anybody else. DUBYA: Very good. The guy memorizes four words, and he plays like he's intercontinental. GREGORY: I can go on. DUBYA: I'm impressed -- que bueno. Now I'm literate in two languages. Selected Quotes from BushQuotations ( http://www.bushquotations.com/ )
"Should I be fortunate enough to earn your confidence, the mission of
the United States military will be to be prepared and ready to fight and win
war. And therefore prevent war from happening in the first place." - from the
3rd Presidential Debate, St. Louis, Missouri, Oct. 17, 2000.
"But as a result of evil, there's some amazing things that are taking place
in America." - Daytona Beach, FL, January 30, 2002
"And so one of the areas where I think the average Russian will realize
that the stereotypes of America have changed is that it's a spirit of
cooperation, not one-upmanship, that we now understand one plus one can equal
three, as opposed to us and Russia we hope to be zero." - Crawford, TX, Nov. 15,
2001
"I can assure you Mr. Chairman, or I wish would be Mr. Chairman - should be
Mr. Chairman, and will be Mr. Chairman after next 2002." - At an Albuquerque
fund raising event for Pete Domenici, August, 2001
''I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and
what I believe—I believe what I believe is right." - in Europe, July 22,
2001
"You saw the president yesterday. I thought he was very forward-leaning, as
they say in diplomatic nuanced circles." - in Europe, July 23, 2001
"We spent a lot of time talking about Africa, as we should. Africa is a
nation that suffers from incredible disease." - June 14, 2001, Press
Conference
"I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for
predecessors as well." - Jan. 29, 2001
"Redefining the role of the United States from enablers to keep the peace
to enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assignment." -
New York Times, Jan. 14, 2001
"The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating
plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants."- New
York Times, Jan. 14, 2001
A callow cowboy stumbles (from the Financial Times)
By Gerard Baker For a moment it looked as if Jacques Chirac had swallowed something
unpleasant. The French president gazed uncomprehendingly at George W. Bush, his
lips pursing and then opening in what looked like a Gallic gasp for
air.
It was halfway into a press conference in the Elysée Palace on Sunday
afternoon and Mr Bush had just stumbled his way through another answer,
forgetting part of the question and joking at his own lack of focus. "That's
what happens when you get past 55," he cracked.
Not only is Mr Chirac about to turn 70 but his advanced age was, for a
while, a sensitive issue in the presidential election campaign just
finished.
It was as though Mr Chirac had gone to Washington a few weeks after Mr
Bush's inauguration and made flippant remarks about the unreliability of
recounts and the role of patrimony in American presidential politics.
Mr Bush's insult was unintentional, of course, but it was not the only
jaw-dropping moment in Sunday's performance by the travelling American
president. Earlier Mr Bush had said he was looking forward to trying some French
food, because "[Jacques] is always telling me the food here is fantastic",
apparently indicating that he had not heard about the quality of French cuisine
in his previous 54 years on the planet.
Later he got into a peevish exchange with an American reporter who had
graciously asked Mr Chirac a question in French. "He memorises four words and
plays like he's all intercontinental," Mr Bush sneered. Reporters shuffled their
notebooks and looked at their feet, embarrassed by this spectacle of an American
president jeering at a fellow American for speaking their host's
language.
Mr Bush's clownish performance was attributed by some to fatigue. It was
Day Five of his European trip and for the past three nights he had been up way
past his normal bedtime of 9.30pm. But there had been other moments, earlier in
the trip, when his comments and demeanour had been a little less than that
normally expected of visiting schoolchildren, let alone heads of
state.
On Day Two in Berlin, he had declared that he wanted to "securitise"
dismantled Russian nuclear weapons. On Day Three in Moscow, he said retaining a
strategic nuclear force was necessary at least in part for reasons of "quality
control".
In St Petersburg, taken to see the magnificent art collection at the
Hermitage Museum, the president had looked gloomily at his watch as the tour
rolled on past 20 minutes. He seemed to perk up only when his guide stopped to
talk about a portrait of a semi-naked Venus, causing Mr Bush to smirk as he
tried to catch the eye of each of the reporters accompanying him.
The St Petersburg tour provided an intriguing contrast. When Vladimir Putin
came to Texas, he was treated to a barbecue and a hoe-down on the ranch. In the
old capital of the Romanovs, Mr Bush got the Hermitage and the ballet.
Since September 11, we have got used to seeing and appreciating the
serious, inspiring side of Mr Bush's plain-spoken simplicity. His simple moral
leadership and evident compassion and strength shoved aside snobbish doubts
about whether he was up to the job. But this last week was a reversion to the
troubling callowness of the campaign aeroplane.
It was hard not to see in the performance a barely concealed, swaggering
Texan contempt for Europe and all its high-flown diplomatic niceties and
high-brow cultural sensibilities. And it was revealing, perhaps above all else,
for what it said about the strained relations between western Europe and the
Bush administration.
For all the talk - justified talk - of substantive transatlantic
differences over Iraq, the "axis of evil", the environment, trade,
multilateralism and the global system, onlookers were reminded that a large part
of the issue is Mr Bush himself.
Europeans - not just the elites but much of their populations - simply find
Mr Bush irredeemably uncouth, a walking, talking version of every American
cliché they love to hate. In cartoons, this figure plays any number of roles:
the loudmouth at the restaurant, haranguing the waiter because his hamburger is
insufficiently well done; the man who sits next to you on the transatlantic
flight with endless stories about the size of his car, mispronouncing the names
of European cities.
It is an easy step to make between the First Tourist displaying vast chasms
of ignorance about the world beyond the Bible Belt and the unilateralist
president pursuing American hegemony in ways that Europeans do not
like.
Such attitudes, of course, betray the same sort of unsophisticated
chauvinism on the part of Europeans as was on display at times from Mr Bush this
last week. There are forces and arguments driving US foreign policy - many of
them deserving of the sort of serious hearing they do not get in Europe. But
those arguments have a hard time getting through to Europeans when it is Mr Bush
who is putting them.
Europe's leaders may understand the difference - but with agitated
electorates on the Old Continent expressing dissatisfaction with their own and
American leadership, these popular caricatures transmit quickly through the
media and opinion polls into policy constraints.
In the end, painful though it is to admit it, this is Europe's problem,
rather than Mr Bush's. The American president is not going to become suddenly a
model of cosmopolitan sophistication, putting an urbane case for US conservatism
as he sashays, Kennedy-like, through the drawing rooms of Europe. Europeans are
just going to have to get over it and display the kind of sang-froid Mr Chirac
so admirably demonstrated last Sunday.
Bush's detailed knowledge of Geography (also from DubyaSpeak)
|
|
< < <
Date Index > > > |
World Systems Network List Archives at CSF | Subscribe to World Systems Network |
< < <
Thread Index > > > |