accidents do happen
CNN Transcript: George W Bush: Before I take your questions, I’d like to discuss a couple subjects.
First, I want to briefly mention that today we’ve released the actual budget numbers for the fiscal year that ended on September the 30th. These numbers show that we have now achieved our goal of cutting the federal budget deficit in half, and we’ve done it three years ahead of schedule.
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I can’t locate a stray sentence I recall that I wish to quote right here and now. I’m thinking this comes from The Trials of Lenny Bruce or the oral history of Lord Buckley Dig Infinity! One other possibility may actually be a Comics Journal interview of some underground cartoonist, fame garnered in the 1960s.
It is not much of a reference, and indeed is slight. Basically the sentence has it that a group of 1950s outcasts, that there “counter-culture”, amused themselves a bit by comparing published newspaper accounts and transcripts of President Dwight D Eisenhower with the grammer-infused speaking that Eisenhower actually made. I think the term “egghead” may be directly attributed to the shape of Adlai Stevenson’s head, the supposedly more erudite and intellectual Democratic opponent who gave insults in Eisenhower’s direction such as “he can’t speak out of a paper bag” and “If I talk over people’s heads, Eisenhower talks under their feet.”
The latest issue of The Weekly Standard, by way of assuring the neconservative reader of such a magagazine, features an article on the troubles all the presidents have had at their sixth year. In the past the glib response to charges of Bush’s creative use of the English language, and other apparent signs of mental difficulty, has been to nod and throw out Eisenhower and Reagan — the psuedo-intellectual liberal elites underestimated those two, and mocked them, and the public loved them — look how out of touch you are! This worked well when Bush had high approval ratings. Today, the comparison that The Weekly Standard has shifted to is to Truman and Reagan — mostly because it benefits their military stance. Eisenhower’s 1958 Recession and various administrative scandals are an after-thought in American history. Reagan is white-washed, as one may expect it to be.
At any rate, unlike CNN — and here it is perhaps because the video is immediately at a user’s disposal on the website itself, the White House website actually has the correct words Bush used, [sic] citation in hand:
In 2004, I made a promise to the American people, we would cut the federal budget deficit in half over five years. Today I’m pleased to report that we have achieved this goal, and we’ve done it three years ahead of schedule. (Applause.)
This morning my administration released the budget numbers for fiscal 2006. These budget numbers are not just estimates; these are the actual results for the fiscal year that ended February the 30th.* [sic]
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Actually this entire blog entry is patently dishonest. You will note that the CNN transcript and the whitehouse transcript are two different events. North Korea dominates, thus the second event’s transcript is available at CNN.com.
I remember once seeing an error of this like first corrected at whitehouse.gov , then later corrected back to the error… public outcry forced that change, I suppose.