Those dastardly speechwriters…
William Saletan deconstructs the administration’s protestations over the now-famous statement in the State of the Union Address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” I found this part interesting:
The intelligence reports on which the claim was based were “given to the speech writers; they wrote it,” Rice pleaded on Fox News Sunday. When asked on Face the Nation how the line got into Bush’s speech, Rice described the process this way: “A text is created.” Tenet agreed that the line “should never have been included in the text written for the President.” True, every president relies on speechwriters. But if presidents get the credit for good lines (and, as in the case of “axis of evil,” get irked when speechwriters take credit for them), they ought to take equal responsibility for the bad ones. If speechwriters were always at fault, no president who stuck to his script could ever be called a liar.
We speak of the “office” of the president because the presidency is more than one person; it is many voices that speak through one person in an attempt to create a unified political agent we call the president. President George W. Bush speaks as the president, but his words are crafted for him by speech writers and edited for style and political content by political aides. The voice we come to know as that of George W. Bush is actually a complex amalgam, although Bush is ultimately politically responsible for these words and this voice.
UPDATE (12:25 p.m.): Michael Kinsley asks: “Whodunit? Was it Col. Mustard in the kitchen with a candlestick? Condoleezza Rice in the Situation Room with a bottle of wite-out and a felt-tipped pen?”
Megan McArdle has a good point on the Kinsley piece when she says: “When the president’s critics are reduced to quibbling over grammar, the battle is lost.” http://www.janegalt.net/
Rebecca…which only goes to show how little she understands about grammar. She should review my section on language assumptions on my media bias page.
The grammar we learned in the 8th grade is the grammar of little old English teachers who trivilize an important subject with stupid exercises like diagramming sentences. It’s not until one has a chance to encounter the true power in language structure that the political uses of language become apparent.
It’s a great toss-off line (score a rhetorical point for her) because so many people think grammar is either itsy-bitsy rules for itsy-bitsy people or something that has absolutely nothing to do with anything outside of school.
Further, while it may be true as she charges that some people will do anything to hurt the president, that does not invalidate the importance of structure to meaning in the critique of a president’s statements.
Megan McArdle has no clue what she’s talking about if she thinks grammar isn’t political.
The Bush administration manipulated the content of environmental reports producing a lie, the stance of the administration on Social Security amounts to either an intellectual inability to understand the distortion of accounting reports or a bald faced lie. This is all irrelevant. People who support Bush will ignore any injustice or lie without critique or analysis. Did he lie about WMD? It doesn’t matter Americans believe they existed and proof isn’t necessary for an American to draw a conclusion. The only thing that will cause this to blow up, is if more people die in Iraq or it costs us money. But even then that will be blamed on a non-existent liberal.