White House Aide Defends Bush Over Grammar
By Patricia Wilson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A senior White House aide sprang to the defense of President George W. Bush's grammar on Saturday, accusing the media of being ``hyper-critical'' in parsing and picking apart his words.
Bush's occasional creative use of the English language was well documented during the election campaign and his move to the White House has intensified the scrutiny, leading to some widely publicized syntactical slips this week.
``They (Americans) don't care what you think about his grammar, they care about what he's going to do that affects their lives,'' Mary Matalin, counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney and assistant to Bush, said in a CNN television interview.
After watching videotaped excerpts from Bush's Thursday news conference, his first formal White House session with the media since taking office on Jan. 20, Matalin bristled at an interviewer's suggestion
that the public might expect more from their president than ``a third-grade grammatical error.''
Discussing the invitation he and first lady Laura Bush extended to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife,
Bush told reporters:
``Laura and I are looking forward to having a private dinner with he and Mrs. Blair Friday night.''
Earlier, Bush seemed unable to choose between singular and plural as a different set of pesky pronouns tripped him up.
Asked what advice he would give politically active members of his family, Bush replied:
``My guidance to them is, behave yourself. And they will.''
``Hyper-Critical'' Media
``Hyper-critical doesn't begin to describe the (media) ... to parse it and pick it apart in the way that it has is discordant with the American people,'' Matalin said on the program ``Evans, Novak, Hunt & Shields.''
Coming just a month into Bush's presidency, the news conference was
``designed to show and telegraph we'll be giving many,''Matalin said, enabling Americans
to ``understand what it is we're doing, not so the grammarians in the press can have a field
day.''
When the ridicule that former Vice President Dan Quayle endured for famously
putting an ``e'' on the end of ``potato'' was raised, Matalin cut in with: ``Are we going to talk
about the president's budget and tax relief?''
Although an official White House transcript of the 30-minute question-and-answer session rendered
almost every word verbatim, it did not contain Bush's inadvertent reference to
cocoa -- instead of coca -- production in Colombia, a slip that gave rise to a host of jokes.
``I think the media handled it with good humor,'' White House spokesman Ari Fleischer quipped
to reporters. His pun was too subtle for most. Good Humor is the name of a popular chocolate ice cream bar.
The media's ``Bushism'' watch went on high alert earlier this week when the president delivered the line,
``You teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test'' at an education event
in Townsend, Tennessee.
The slip was reproduced in newspapers and magazines around the country
. NBC's late-night television host Jay Leno awarded it ''The George W. Bush Quote of the Day.'' |
