I had a revelation this morning.
It’s long been clear that President Bush’s second language is English (though the White House has never revealed his first language; presumably that knowledge would somehow aid terrorists). So when he was announcing the nuclear deal with North Korea and repeatedly said his usual “nucular,” I at first just shrugged and said to myself, Yeah, he still doesn’t get it.
But wait. Even though he’s one step from being functionally illiterate, surely he has advisers and speechwriters who weren’t sleeping off a frat-boy hangover during English class. So when he’s reading a prepared statement – as he was this morning – surely those speechwriters could have written “nu-clee-er” on his script to make sure he got it right.
That’s when it hit me: he doesn’t want to get it right. Forget his Christian-right base, his oil-company puppeteers – he doesn’t want to alienate his illiterate base.
Saying “nuclear” would be almost like breaking a campaign promise.
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