At the last Drinking Liberally get together I was expounding on an observation I’ve made before about Republican Presidents I can personally recall. That is, those that lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue while I have breathed the air of this dying earth.
I have observed that, over time, each Republican President makes his or her predecessors look good by comparison, the only exceptions possibly being the “accidental” Republican Presidents, Ford and the first Bush. Eisenhower was a mediocre President, who now looks extremely good and eminently sane by comparison with his successors. Nixon was bat shit crazy. At the time I thought no one could ever be worse, but Reagan beat him by a country mile. The second Bush, in turn, made Reagan look good, and odds are that if an R gets elected in 2012, she’ll make little Georgie look like a statesman of the first order. God only knows what will come next if the Republic survives the next Republican president.
One of my Drinking Liberally friends wrote me an email riffing off this idea, pointing out (and sending lots of examples) that while the First Bush may have been somewhat less awful than Reagan or his own offspring, he did start a now proud Republican tradition of murdering the English language. We don’t need to document his son’s lapses, and we’ve all got our favorites from Sarah, whose most recent incoherent comments go like this:
“And nobody yet has, nobody yet has explained to the American public what they know, and surely they know more than the rest of us know who it is who will be taking the place of Mubarak and no, not, not real enthused about what it is that that’s being done on a national level and from DC in regards to understanding all the situation there in Egypt. And, in these areas that are so volatile right now, because obviously it’s not just Egypt but the other countries too where we are seeing uprisings, we know that now more than ever, we need strength and sound mind there in the White House. We need to know what it is that America stands for so we know who it is that America will stand with. And, we do not have all that information yet.”
But that’s coherent next to this example from Georgie’s dad:
“And let me say in conclusion, thanks for the kids. I learned an awful lot about bathtub toys — about how to work the telephone. One guy knows — several of them know their own phone numbers — preparation to go to the dentist. A lot of things I’d forgotten. So it’s been a good day.”
Now, I say, that given the Republican party’s support for English-only education, et al., that we can at least expect them to field English-only candidates. And I further say that English isn’t just words from the OED! You have to know how to string them together. That’s why my six years of German never took. I knew lots of words, but I couldn’t string them together to save my life, though at least I knew what they meant, which is more than you can say about Sarah, though she might refudiate me on that.
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