President Bush was recorded using profanity today in a conversation with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The conversation just before a lunch of the leaders at the G8 summit in St. Pteresburg, Russia, was recorded when cameras were filming the leaders sitting down to the lunch for release to media. Apparently, the cameras do not normally record footage in a format where specific conversations are intelligible.
Read the CNN report and watch the video of raw footage, which includes the profanity and the context. By the way, CNN titled the report "The sh-t heard 'round the world." Now that is funny.
I have not seen any of the talking heads nattering on about this today, but I imagine they are making it a so-called "top story" when it really is no big deal. Bush said he thinks Syria should "stop this shit" in rfeference to the Middle Eastern nation's role in recent violence in the region, especially in Lebanon. Honestly, a few million other residents of the country and world think Syria should stop that shit as well.
This does not bother me at all. The president is an somewhat earthy man, and it comes as no surprise that he swears. Hell, he has let his guard down on an open mic before (in 2000, as a candidate, he called a New York Times reporter a "major league asshole"). And, Bush is from Texas.
I kind of like a person who swears. Some people say swearing shows a lack of vocabulary. Not so, I say. I think there is an art and heirarchy to swearing that allows one to combine vocabulary, word form, tone and inflection to achieve the perfect expression for a situation. Sometimes we don't have a proper "polite company" word for a thought. We need a swear word, dammit.
President Bush is right that Syria should "stop this shit," and if he needs to go on TV to say it, I say go for it. Hell, it probably won't change the impression of him held by most people.
-- Wenatchee, Wash.
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