That’s not an offensive question. You want an offensive question?
ABC News’ blog reports – and it comes as a shock to absolutely no-one – that Bush’s speeches include words spelled phonetically.
The comments include a lot of people saying “So what?” and, really, I don’t worry too much about it. Of the Bush administration’s systemic incompetency, Bush’s mispronunciations are probably the smallest symptom. I worry more about this part of the article.
[White House Press Secretary] Perino said it was “not unusual” to include phonetic spellings for various countries in the speech though when asked if the president had a hard time pronouncing some of those country names Perino declined comment saying, “I think that’s an offensive question.”
The man had five different pronunciations of the name “Abu Ghraib” in the same sentence. I think the question of whether or not Bush has a hard time pronouncing some names is not offensive, it’s blindingly obvious. The idea that such a stunningly apparent inquiry would be deemed “offensive” is, to me, far more telling than whether or not Bush can pronounce “Kyrgyzstan.”