Bush Gets Phonetics Help For Public Speaking

[Aaron]

AOL News

NEW YORK (Sept. 26) - How do you keep a leader as verbally gaffe-prone as U.S. President George W. Bush from making even more slips of the tongue?


When Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, the White House inadvertently showed exactly how -- with a phonetic pronunciation guide on the teleprompter to get him past troublesome names of countries and world leaders.

The White House was left scrambling to explain after a marked-up draft of Bush's speech popped up briefly on the U.N. Web site as he delivered his remarks, giving a rare glimpse of the special guidance he gets for major addresses.

It included phonetic spellings for French President Nicolas Sarkozy (sar-KO-zee), a friend, and Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe (moo-GAH-bee), a target of U.S. human rights criticism.

Pronunciations were also provided for Kyrgyzstan (KEYR-geez-stan), Mauritania (moor-EH-tain-ee-a) and the Zimbabwe capital Harare (hah-RAR-ray).

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the draft, labeled the 20th version and complete with typos and speechwriters' cellphone numbers, had been turned over in advance to help U.N. interpreters who must simultaneously translate leaders' speeches into several languages.

Bush's text also had to be loaded onto a teleprompter to appear on screens in front of the podium as he spoke.

"There was an error made," Perino told reporters. "I don't know how the draft of the speech that was not final was posted but it was and it was taken back."

"Anyone giving a major speech or delivering a broadcast, like on the morning and nightly network news, has phonetics for cues just for the possibility they're needed," she later explained.

Bush is no stranger to the occasional faux pas, and often jokes about his habit of mangling the English language.

One of his highest-profile gaffes came in May when, at a welcoming ceremony for Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, he nearly placed her in the 18th century.

At a speech during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Sydney earlier this month, Bush seemed to confuse the organization with OPEC and spoke of Austrian troops in Iraq when he meant to say Australian.

I think it's pretty teling that he gets help but he still fraks up all the time. Apologies about the source.

[Blackstar the Chakat]

I once heard someone compare Bush to Hitler. The difference? Hitler was better with speeches.

[Captain Peabody]

So what?

I'd have trouble pronouncing some of those words...

I once heard someone compare Bush to Hitler. The difference? Hitler was better with speeches.

Oh, and Hitler was a genocidal mass-murderer, too....but they're really exactly the same, deep down inside.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

I gotta agree with Peabody here. So he needs a bit of help prounoncing the words. I'd have problems pronouncing a lot of those words. Better a little help off-camera.

[Mikey]

While this isn't a value judgement on Bush himself (because I've made plenty of those elsewhere,) it's just annoying to have your president SOUND like an idiot. After 9/11, Bush made a speech followed closely by Tony Blair. It was like listening to a schizophrenic, and then listening to Robert Frost.

[Captain Seafort]

Well to be fair, comparing a bloke who won an election in the courts based on a rather strange definition of what counts as a vote to one who won a landslide victory with the Labour party after 17 years of the Tories puts Bush at a disadvantage to start with - Blairs is a good public speaker regardless of who you comparing him with. The fact that Bush is a blithering idiot just emphasised the point.

It's a bit like the old Thatcher/Reagan jokes - that Thatcher first told Reagan what she thought on a given topic, and then told him what he thought. For the last few years, press conferences have been Bush telling the press something, then Blair telling them what he actually meant to say.