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Edited on Tue May-04-04 08:43 PM by markomalley
...185 articles where the Shrub and "seizure" were mentioned in the same paragraph. Out of those, 184 were talking about seizure, like in "search and seizure." One of them mentioned something else: (sorry...I'm going to post the entire article here, because you won't be able to retrieve it otherwise unless you pay the Wash Post some $$)
Anyway...hope it helps out some.
The Washington Post
May 5, 2000, Friday, Final Edition
SECTION: STYLE; Pg. C01
LENGTH: 1371 words
HEADLINE: What's on W's Mind? Hard To Say.
BYLINE: Dana Milbank , Washington Post Staff Writer
BODY:
Inside the human brain, a part of the frontal lobe called Broca's area directs the production of clear and intelligible speech. In the case of Texas Gov. George W. Bush, however, something between Broca's area and the tongue has an occasional tendency to go comically wrong.
When Bush endeavors to say "tariffs and barriers," it can come out "terriers and bariffs." "Handcuffs" mysteriously becomes "cuff links," and "tactical nuclear weapons" morphs into "tacular weapons." Once, Bush's brain cruelly caused its owner to pronounce "missile launches" as "mential losses."
The insensitive louts of the press generally respond to these examples of Bushspeak by making fun of their author. A network producer on the Bush bus nicknamed him "The English Patient." Garry Trudeau and Maureen Dowd parody his gaffes. The online magazine Slate anthologizes the growing collection of "Bushisms." (This week's installment: "I hope we get to the bottom of the answer.")
Yuk, yuk. Very funny.
Surely we wouldn't make fun of a man suffering from diabetic attacks or epileptic seizures. And though Bush's affliction isn't so serious, there's the possibility that he can't control it. To examine this possibility, we asked the opinions of leading speech pathologists. They haven't examined the man, but they have a few ideas.
"It's a Verbal Goulash Syndrome," pronounces Sam Chwat, a New York speech therapist who has helped the likes of Julia Roberts and Robert De Niro say their lines. Lyn Goldberg, a George Washington University speech pathologist, pronounces the governor "motorically vulnerable." Ray Kent, a University of Wisconsin expert, says the governor suffers from "sequencing errors" and "lexical confusions."
Clearly. When Bush attended Perseverance Month at a New Hampshire school, he famously declared: "This is Preservation Month. I appreciate preservation. It's what you do when you run for president. You've got to preserve." Another time, he repeatedly insisted that "I denounce interracial dating." (He meant he denounced a policy against interracial dating.)
Part of the problem is not of his making: It's the fault of snobbish Easterners who just can't understand his West Texas dialect. Sure, he talks about "nucular" warheads, but so do many Southerners, including Jimmy Carter. So what if "obfuscate" rolls off Bush's lips as "obscufate" and "obsfucate"? They understand him just fine in Midland. Yet he continues "getting pillared in the press and cartoons," as he puts it, grasping for "pilloried."
Bush's aides say the malapropisms are the byproduct of an effervescent nature and an agile mind. Why the gobbledygook? "Because his brain faster works than his mouth does," jokes Mindy Tucker, the governor's spokeswoman.
It's true that Bush speaks far more freely than his Democratic rival, Al Gore, who gets panned for his slow and deliberate speaking style. Gore chooses his words carefully and corrects his own mistakes, but he orates like a somnambulist.
Some of Bush's errors could happen to any person under pressure and public scrutiny, particularly when their off-the-cuff remarks are transcribed for posterity. Surely it was an honest mistake when he chanted: "If you're sick and tired of the politics of cynicism and polls and principles, come and join this campaign." Obviously, he knows it's not correct that he said, "I understand small business growth--I was one," and "There is madmen in the world and there are terror," and "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"
Bush, however, unlike Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush, doesn't get the benefit of the doubt after a linguistic lapse. Perhaps it's because of his history of related flubs: his juxtaposing Slovenia and Slovakia, and his East Timorians, Grecians and Kosovians.
Bush also has a rich tradition of verbal pratfalls. Bill Minutaglio, a Dallas Morning News reporter and Bush biographer, was the recipient of this Bush puzzler six years ago: "It was just inebriating what Midland was all about then." Presumably, Bush was reaching for "intoxicating."
Speech pathologist Chwat says the governor is probably modeling his speech after that of his famous father, consciously or unconsciously. It's simply the way he learned to talk, Chwat says.
Famous for coining phrases and words such as "hyporhetorical questions" and "hypothecate," Bush the elder constantly spouted Yogi Berraisms, once imploring: "Please don't look at part of the glass, the part that is only less than half full."
Indeed, some of the gaffes of Bush fils sound like his father's. The son launched this gem early in the campaign: "When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world and we knew exactly who the 'they' were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who 'them' was. Today, we're not so sure who the 'they' are, but we know they're there."
Tired cliches breathe new life on the governor's tongue. "We ought to make the pie higher," he opines, and suggests that one "can't take the high horse and claim the low road." Particularly if he is one of those Internet millionaires "who have become rich beyond their means." Better call the credit bureau.
"He has a singular output channel, and he's jamming it with too many words," Chwat says. Some other errors, he adds, are evidence of an "incomplete education" (despite Bush's two Ivy League degrees). Among the flubs Chwat puts in this category: When Bush says that "I don't have to accept their tenants," instead of tenets, and when he talks about education being about more than "bricks and mortars," using the term for heavy artillery instead of the construction mixture.
But is Bush's problem simply a matter of nurture? Other scientists are convinced that nature has some role. Robert Shprintzen, an otolaryngologist and speech pathologist at the State University of New York's Upstate Medical University, says Bush's speech pattern, like everybody's, is influenced by genetics.
Much of the way people talk is biological, Shprintzen says, dictated by the physical structure of the brain, the number of brain cells and the level of neurotransmitters such as dopamine. Obviously, George W. would inherit characteristics from his old man; "even children who have been separated from their parents at birth have been found to be astonishingly like their parents," Shprintzen says.
Still, Gov. Bush's speech errors are arguably worse than his old man's: President Bush switched words and contorted sentences, but his son occasionally produces outright gibberish. That leads GWU's Goldberg to make a worrisome observation: Goldberg says Bush shares some traits with those suffering from a serious speech disorder known as apraxia, which at its worst leaves its victims unable to utter anything meaningful.
The disorder, often caused by a stroke, disrupts the neural programming of speech-related muscles, causing trouble selecting, timing and ordering sounds, and a tendency to shorten words.
But Goldberg hastens to add that she isn't diagnosing Bush with the disorder and, in fact, doubts he is apraxic. The symptoms are likely coincidental, in the same way someone with a winter cough shares certain symptoms with a lung cancer patient. Still, Goldberg says, "it's striking when you see these sound problems and timing errors in his speech."
Among the worrisome signs: In Bush's speech, "viable" has come out "vile," "subsidization" has posed as "subsidation," "balkanize" has masqueraded as "vulcanize" and "ascribe" has seen its duties replaced by "subscribe." Sentences, too, get condensed, to bizarre effect. "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family," he told one perplexed audience.
Whatever the cause, the English Patient should survive this malady. Of greater concern is what happens to the rest of us. "The problem is, it's catching," says Richard Wolffe, who has been following the governor for the Financial Times. "I can't even say 'tariffs' anymore. I say 'terriers.' "
Wolffe, who kept a log of Bush's verbal creations on his laptop computer, found his collection destroyed when the Bush campaign bus, suspiciously, ran over the laptop. Maybe that's what Bush meant by a mential loss.
LOAD-DATE: May 05, 2000
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