Radio fragment



I do most of my listening to the radio, as opposed to podcasts, in the car. As a result, I often hear tantalising fragments or walk out on the famous and powerful in mid sentence. This morning on the way to the shop to buy bread, I heard the Great Misspeaker in reflective mode:
... Abu Ghraib was a disappointment of course, and not having weapons of mass destruction...

I imagine that quote is all over the internet, but I heard it with my own two ears before I was properly awake. Disappointment, Mr President, is what you experience when your parents go to Europe and all they bring you back is a lousy T shirt, not when people are tortured on your watch and the perpetrators exonerated. Try remorse. And since you do have weapons of mass destruction and have not only used them but have also stood by while a client state used them, that last phrase is clearly a misspeak. But as Bushisms go, it's chilling. It was disappointing that Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction, because then he might have used them and the resulting piles of corpses would have made the case for war so much clearer? It was disappointing not to find the weapons of mass destruction because the universe where they existed would have been so much more Bush-friendly than the reality-based universe? It was disappointing to have been caught out paltering with us in half truths, being responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths? Yes, that would be disappointing. No wonder the language broke up when you tried to articulate the thought.

Later addition: As you'd expect, a helpful media has taken a guess at what the president actually meant to say, writing 'finding' where he said 'having'. Still chilling.

Posted: Tue - January 13, 2009 at 08:31 AM           |

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