That said man is the President of the United States would make it all the more laughable if it didn't have such tragic implications for the rest of us.
Here's the story from Reuters...
"Childrens do learn," Bush tells school kidsAnd just think: his father was "the Education President"!
Wed Sep 26, 2007 1:46pm EDTNEW YORK (Reuters) - Offering a grammar lesson guaranteed to make any English teacher cringe, President George W. Bush told a group of New York school kids on Wednesday: "Childrens do learn."
Bush made his latest grammatical slip-up at a made-for-TV event where he urged Congress to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, the centerpiece of his education policy, as he touted a new national report card on improved test scores.
The event drew New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings plus teachers and about 20 fourth and fifth graders from P.S. 76.
During his first presidential campaign, Bush -- who promised to be the "education president" -- once asked: "Is our children learning?"
On Wednesday, Bush seemed to answer his own question with the same kind of grammatical twist.
"As yesterday's positive report card shows, childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured," he said.
The White House opted to clean up Bush's diction in the official transcript.
Bush is no stranger to verbal gaffes. He often acknowledges he was no more than an average student in school and jokes about his habit of mangling the English language.
Just a day earlier, the White House inadvertently showed how it tries to prevent Bush from making even more slips of the tongue than he already does.
As Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, a marked-up draft of his speech briefly popped up on the U.N. Web site, complete with a phonetic pronunciation guide to get him past troublesome names of countries and world leaders.
3 comments:
Chris come on. Everyone makes mistakes. Have you ever made an error yourself? With all this blogging going on surely you have made a mistake before. I am not defending him. But I will bet that almost every president has made some error before. If that is a requirement to be president then we would not have a president. Presidents are not gods. They are just men like you and me.
Johnny
Johnny, c'mon: "childrens do learn"?!? If this was the first or second time Bush had "slipped up", I could understand it.
But the sad fact is that he does this ALL the time! It is a persistent pattern, indicative of something and very possibly quite serious.
If you or I had said "childrens do learn" when we were students in elementary school, we would have received quite a tongue-lashing... and deservedly so.
Y'know, Winston Churchill was known to goof-up while speaking on occasion. The difference is, with Churchill it was almost always (so far as I've been able to tell) intentional. He never used the word "ain't" in his regular speech, but he *did* use it at least once to make particular emphasis about something. And even that was a stretch for him to do.
If nothing else, this latest verbal mangling proves one thing: America does not seem to have many people possessing the caliber of vocabulary as Winston Churchill. Shame, that...
"I seriously have to question the mental processes of any man who murders grammar to the point that he says "childrens do learn"."
Dats da problem with da prez, he dont speak no poifect english no how. ;-)
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