Um... Am I missing something really obvious? I thought that comment actually made total sense.
Nelson Mandela is still alive.
Yes, but he's not saying that Nelson Mandela is dead. He's saying that his Iraqi equivalents are dead. .... isn't he?
Is he?
I saw John Stewart making fun of this on the Daily Show, and didn't get it. When Bush says that Saddam killed "all the Mandelas" it seems pretty clear that he's saying that all the Hussein killed all the *would be* Mandelas.
Bush does a pretty sloppy job delivering his point, but he isn't claiming that Nelson Mandela is actually dead.
It's just a fucking bizarre, aphasic thing to say. Bush's use of language is (or has become) malappropriate, clumsy to the point of literally sounding retarded.
The first few times I heard it, it really did sound to me like he meant that THE Mandela was indeed dead. What a moron. Why does he even try for rhetorical devices that his handlers, even if not he himself, MUST know he's too much of a poor speaker to carry off?
Bush does a pretty sloppy job delivering his point, but he isn't claiming that Nelson Mandela is actually dead.
He isn't? Let's go to tape:
"Where is Mandela? Well Mandela's dead!"
I think he's saying Mandela's dead. It's not the first time he's said wildly inaccurate things - do we really need to list examples here? Ok fine.
42. "The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorize himself." —Grand Rapids, Mich., Jan. 29, 2003
44. "You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror." --interview with CBS News' Katie Couric, Sept. 6, 2006
38. "I hear there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft." --presidential debate, St. Louis, Mo., Oct. 8, 2004 (Watch video clip)
32. "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." --on "Good Morning America," Sept. 1, 2005, six days after repeated warnings from experts about the scope of damage expected from Hurricane Katrina
23. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." --Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005 (Listen to audio clip)
Anyway, the odds that he's making an "allegory" (I think it's more accurate to claim he's making a metaphor, even though he isn't.) are low. He wildly misspoke again. He's not bright, okay? We elected a callous frat boy dumbshit, and that's all there is to it.
From the YouTube link:
batguano99 (15 minutes ago)
(Reply)
Well apparently Buss' way of speech is too advanced for a bunch of leftloonies. What he says is just like saying that "Marx is dead. Lenin, Stalin and Hitler (and other socialist dictators) killet the marxists".
It's called an allegory. Go look it up. Dummies!
I hope that's a troll. I'm really depressed that I logged in expecting to find the obvious - people marvelling at what a dumbshit a--hole Bush is and already there's the putrid funk of spin that he somehow meant something by it.
The man has checked out, okay? He's gone. We're driving blind for another year. During wartime. Okay? That's what we elected. 'Cause we're geniuses, apparently.
Ok, ok, I'm not a right-wing spin doctor, I'm not a political friend of the Bush administration... heck, I'm a bit of a leftie by British and Canadian standards, which is probably pretty much the same as a raving commie by American standards, but I am a native speaker of English, and I think that Bush, in this instance, is making perfect, cogent sense. Ok, he's not speaking with the wit and eloquence of a great orator, but that's hardly news for this man.
It's all about context. Bush is talking about Iraq, and he says somebody asked him 'where is Mandela?' They're obviously not talking about the literal Mandela, because that would be very odd in the context of Iraq. They're talking about a figurative Mandela, an Iraqi 'Mandela', a universally respected figure of peace who could rise above sectarian tensions to unite the country and move forward. And if that isn't clear enough, if you actually infer that Mr Bush was considering parachuting Nelson Mandela into Baghdad, he further clarifies his statement by saying 'Saddam killed all the Mandelas'.
I honestly don't understand how you could possibly interpret his statement as expressing the belief that Nelson Mandela, the octogenarian former President of South Africa, was dead, given the context in which it was made and given what he goes on to say immediately afterwards.
Also, this phraseology is probably not particularly original to Bush. Phrasing things in this way is quite common for international relations people. I quite often hear people say things like 'the tragedy of the Phantasians is that they needed Gandhi, but they got Churchill'. Nobody actually thinks that these actual historical figures were being raised from the grave; they are, as your purveyors of 'putrid spin' would suggest, metaphors that are understood by the IR cognescenti.
Now if you want to criticise Bush about that statement, I might suggest you call him out for setting up straw men. The fact that there is no Iraqi Mandela is something that was well understood even before the war began, and it emphatically isn't an excuse for not doing well now. But I don't think it's an inaccurate or completely unreasonable thing to say.
Fair enough, didn't mean to get pointed at you 'noughty, just fussy about Bush in general. It's been a very very very long 6 years. 7. Whatever. Fox News, Karl Rove, and the Swift Boaters have worn my patience with this sort of situation.
The phraseology suggests he's referring to an actual person. If he'd said, "'Where is Mandela?' Well, the Mandelas are dead" that would be another thing entirely. "Mandeala", singular, can be forced into a metaphorical framework but when was the last metaphor such as that that Bush made? Ever, even? (Scripted comments excluded, enter your example today to win $10 off your next multibillion dollar invasion of the Middle East.)
Perhaps he has some individual in mind - I'm sure apologists can conjure a sackful of names in no time - but it seems unlikely. Not to mention Nelson Mandela fought against the administration in power, which is arguably us in this sense, and over racial discrimination, not religious. The alleged metaphor is weak to begin with, if not plainly bizarre.
I would like to see the minute or two before that comment. It's pretty decontextualized by the fact that it starts seconds before the oddplosion.
It made perfect sense to me, once he hit the sentence after "Mandela's dead".
I second Dreadnought on this. I'm not a fan of Bush's by any stretch, but he made his point, however awkwardly. He's done far worse than this in the past.
Dread is right, of course. It is news to me, though, that Nelson Mandela came to power through the armed intervention of the USA.
I guess the world is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to get until you actually invade that country. Sometimes you get a Mandela; sometimes a Mugabe; sometimes a Tony Blair. And then sometimes, you get nothing. At least in Iraq it wasn't a Castro, or a Ho Chi Minh, or a General Aideed.
I say 'nothing', but I kind of think that in the long run we're getting Muqtada al-Sadr?
So, Mandela's not dead?
As long as we remember him, no.
*blink*
What? (*Googles*)
Okay, here's the sentence just before the tape:
Part of the reason why there is not this instant democracy in Iraq is because people are still recovering from Saddam Hussein’s brutal rule.
I see. So "Mandela (??!)'s dead." Saddam "killed all the Mandelas" which justifies this insane invasion.
Fine. He misspoke in grand style again. But he's not technically having a psychotic break in front of the press yet. My apologies for being pissily annoyed at attempted explanations for his continued warmongering blathery.
Theyd better up his dose though, just to be on the safe side. He's running a little kludgy.
I agree that he's said worse things in the past, but that doesn't make this speech any less clumsy, ridiculous, and sensationalistic.
So no zombie Mandela, then?
Dreadnought: Yeah, I see where you're coming from, but why do we always have to overthink a plate of Bush beans?
Jumpin' Jaysus on an innerspring, can you imagine if we would honestly need him to act as a DIPLOMAT?
This country elected an idiot.
Actually, President Bush can be quite an asset when talking to diplomats. I was once talking to the Slovakian ambassador to NATO -- a fierce looking man with the bearing of an old skool Eastern Bloc general -- when I accidentally referred to him as a Slovenian. His aide gawped at me with a look of utter horror and I seriously thought, for a moment, that the ambassador was about to give me a parade ground dressing down right there over the canapés.
Fortunately, I was able to laugh and make a joke about how I was now in the running for President of the US: Bush had just landed in Slovenia and declared how happy he was to be in Slovakia. There was no way that this guy was going to utter a word against somebody like Bush, so the situation was diffused and we had a good chat.
Hey, that's a great tactic! "I may have made a mistake, but at least I'm not a total numbskull like the leader of the free world!"
The *what*?
The free world. It's the American name for itself.
"Leader of the free world" is a figure of speech; I don't think anyone means it literally.
Fortunately, I was able to laugh and make a joke about how I was now in the running for President of the US
Bad Slovenian accent:
Take zem out and shootz zem bof! Shootz za schupit one firzt. O da, dat one. Ne, dat one. O da... Ne...
SHOOTZ ZEM BOF!!
As a member of the free world I don't recognize him as my leader.
It's an odd turn of phrase, certainly. Wiki.
The discussion tab on that one is worth a look. I had heard the phrase before, I think, but it sounds so very odd to these non-USA ears, full of chutzpah, blinders and trombones!
Maclean's? Is that still around? I haven't been to the dentist in a while...
The 'stache doesn't look half-bad, actually. Makes him look mysterious, debonair...
Who was the last moustachioed president, anyway? Taft?
Monkeyfilter: Chutzpah, blinders and trombones!
I'd like to buy an amendment to privacy, Alex.
Nice job, roryk, except I'm not sure why Admiral Nelson is there.
*mattenklopp*
It took me a long time to get that, roryk, but when I did it was worth it. Well done!
Bushbeans? Jumpin' Jaysus on an innerspring, can you imagine if we would honestly need him to act as a DIPLOMAT? This country elected an idiot.