Your Demon Rests Her Case

Ill: Mark Bryan

"The Puppet Show"

with permission

http://www.artofmarkbryan.com/

For those readers who've not yet divined why Demon calls her blog Moron Cowboy, this should clear up the mystery.

From a Reuters report following Bush's address to the UN we get the news that the leader of the free world, who's had ~ what, 6 depressing years to learn other world leaders' names ~ still can't pronounce them without the aid of phonetic spellings:

"How do you keep a leader as verbally gaffe-prone as U.S. President George W. Bush from making even more slips of the tongue?

"When Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, the White House inadvertently showed exactly how -- with a phonetic pronunciation guide on the teleprompter to get him past troublesome names of countries and world leaders.

"The White House was left scrambling to explain after a marked-up draft of Bush's speech popped up briefly on the U.N. Web site as he delivered his remarks, giving a rare glimpse of the special guidance he gets for major addresses.

"It included phonetic spellings for French President Nicolas Sarkozy (sar-KO-zee), a friend, and Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe (moo-GAH-bee), a target of U.S. human rights criticism.
Pronunciations were also provided for Kyrgyzstan (KEYR-geez-stan), Mauritania (moor-EH-tain-ee-a) and the Zimbabwe capital Harare (hah-RAR-ray).

"White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the draft, labelled the 20th version and complete with typos and speechwriters' cellphone numbers, had been turned over in advance to help U.N. interpreters who must simultaneously translate leaders' speeches into several languages.
Bush's text also had to be loaded onto a teleprompter to appear on screens in front of the podium as he spoke."

"'There was an error made,' Perino told reporters. 'I don't know how the draft of the speech that was not final was posted but it was and it was taken back.'

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070925/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_bush_phonetics

Things like this make us more than usually embarrassed & humiliated to be known as Americans during the Bush years. The rest of the world must be wondering, rightly, whether we've completely lost our minds to "elect" *haha* a man who, left to his own devices, so obviously has none.