Reply #59: well, at the very least ...

[Lisa]

... it shows he has trouble with tenses (saying "I had seen this plane fly into the first building" instead of "I had seen that a plane had flown into the first building") -- or even with his memory (confusing footage from later in the day, or even the day after, with what was on the TV screen then).

So he's either a liar, or an insecure arrogant fool who doesn't bother checking his facts (kind of ironic given that the Bushies are always going on about "revisionist historians" who "don't believe in the facts").

When people suggest to me that he "just" made a mistake with that timeline mismatch, I remind them that this is also rather dangerous, given his job. He hasn't retracted the statement or corrected it (in fact he repeated it). He's the kind of guy who hates to admit he was wrong or mistaken about anything, so I'm not too surprised, but it's pretty unprofessional.

I seem to recall an incident not long after he took office, when he accused North Korea of having broken an agreement ... and it turned out he was trying to say something along the lines of "if they've done this, our reaction will be". Screwing up the subjunctive like that can cause a lot of misunderstanding. Not what you want when engaging in diplomacy. (Of course, since when has he been big on diplomacy?) And conflating things to make a "new story" in his mind, even if it's not conscious deception, has a similar end effect -- a fictional scenario that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. (Like the time when he got Sweden mixed up with Switzerland ... I wish I were making it up, but it happened.)

http://www.dubyaspeak.com/incidents.shtml


This guy is like the Imperial stormtrooper in the original Star Wars movie -- very suggestible. No wonder Karl Rove and Co. have no trouble convincing him that "God picked you to be President".