Why can't Bush speak like normal people do?

[napi21]

I just heard him AGAIN on CNN trying to express his sorrow about the Berg beheading. Even in a short, what should be heartfelt sentence, he hesitates, adds the er, ah, um, between almost every word.

Has anyone on this board ever actually talked to this guy personaly? Does he talk this way to Laura and the girls?

Gees, I can't stand to listen to him!

[fertilizeonarbusto]

1. because he's subnormal, natch

n/t

[elfwitch]

2. I hate the "accent"

He puts on that Texas twang like some people put on socks. Are we really expected to believe that someone given the rare and expensive education opportunities that he was given could walk out of Ivy League institutions with an accent like that?

I've lived in Texas my entire life and my manner of speaking is untraceable. People who speak to me cannot tell what part of the country I am from. I am accent-less.

[CBHagman]

8. Look at the whole accent.

Bush does that faux folksy thing in many of his addresses, referring to physicians as "docs" and dropping his g's.

Then he says "rather," and it comes out with a broad a. Where on Earth does that come? On him, it sounds like an affectation.

[DenverDem]

9. You are lucky.

After youth in deep east Texas and years of working in Atlanta and Florida my drawl is debilitating.

[elfwitch]

11. I had a very strict speech and debate coach...

There was hell to pay if any of us dropped Gs or drawled in any way. I got busted most often for the pronunciation for the number 10.

I was pronouncing it like T-I-N, as in the metal used to make roofs. I got nailed so often that I never pronounce it wrong now.

[Jane Austin]

15. I'm not an accentless Texan, but people often are

surprised to hear I am from Texas.

I was born here, lived here all my life, went to public schools in East Texas, and my mother had a real Southern accent and my father a Texas accent.

I'm afraid I do say "pin" for "pen", "oan" for "on", "agin" for "again" when I'm not careful, but otherwise I speak a pretty standard English.

Bush, on the other hand, has been studying Jimmy Swaggert videos, as far as I can tell.

[TNOE]

20. Remember though

he spent his time at those Universities not getting an education - or even trying to learn anything - it was just a matter of getting them on his resume. He was too busy binge drinking and snorting coke to have actually learned anything.

[robbedvoter]

3. Mark Crispin Miller explained in the Bush Dislexicon that his speech

gets worse as it reflects less what he thinks. Whenever he impersonates a human being, he is tongue tied.
When he says " Bring them On" brain links to tongue - cuz he loves that.

[jdsmith]

4. See _The Bush Dyslexicon_ and this from _Slate_

http://slate.msn.com/id/2100064

Everyone falls for this crap--media, public, and, I'm afraid, most of us, too. (It's so damned fun to act that he's a moron.) Bush's yammer is Machiavellian.

[napi21]

19. Great article! Why can't we get most of the average American

people to see this?

Most of what was in that article, I had heard in the past. It's been a lot of years now, if you incorporate his terms a Gov. and term as Pres, and the campaigns for both. Still lots of people just don't see through it! WHY?

[NewJeffCT]

5. Isn't he the only Bush brother to have the accent?

No Texas accent for Jeb or Marvin or Neil, if I am not mistaken.

14. I learned in school (in a cultural geography class)

that accents are basically set into your speech based on where you were living between the ages of 8 to 10.
So different brothers could easily have different accents.
I know I've got a Missouri twang that I've never completely shaken off even though I only lived there for about 4 years.

That said, Bush's speech pattern is probably contrived. He speaks in really short fragments with all those pauses as an act I think.
I have heard him speak differently on occasion. I wonder if it's to play to the masses or perhaps to try to control the listener, like the way people who suddenly get quieter in their speech right when they are giving you the important part of the sentence do, forcing you to pay attention.

whatever it is, it bugs me!

[Wapsie B]

6. He's quite clear and lucid

when talking about revenge and punishment. Doesn't miss a beat.

[DenverDem]

7. Notice when he tells really big lies he blinks three times quickly.

Very apparent when he was kissing rummy's ass at the pentagon.

[Catherine Vincent]

10. That's from sniffing too much snow flake in his past.

[TheWizardOfMudd]

12. Like Randi says . . .

. . . HE'S AN IDIOT!

[Zero Gravitas]

13. Because he's mot a normal person

and he has never even met a normal person.

[roguevalley]

16. There's an analysis on Salon.com about him. They said he's chosen

to be stupid. He's probably not completely dumb. He's just willfully stupid because he didn't have to be smart. Good story.

[Bozita]

17. Gail Sheehy wrote a Vanity Fair article about Dumbya's dyslexia

Here's a taste:

http://www.gailsheehy.com/Politics/politicsindex_hill11_10_03.html

To this day Bush retains the emotional imprint of failure. Returning from their 20th reunion he described to Johnson the big red zero on top of his first English paper and the teacher's admonition: See me immediately. He had written a story about the death of his little sister, Robin, and followed his mother's instructions not to repeat the same words but to look for synonyms in the thesaurus. Having used the word "tear" once, he wrote about "lacerates" running down his cheek. His teacher obviously judged the sophomore's mistake as one of ignorance. It may have been something very different—a hint of possible dyslexia.

" he really didn't understand the language," observes Sue Horn, former president of the Maryland branch of the International Dyslexia Association. According to Horn, Bush couldn't distinguish between the word "tears," meaning to rip, and "tears," meaning crying.

Dyslexia is not an issue of intelligence. It does run in families. Neil Bush, George's younger brother, had difficulty with reading acquisition and was tutored by his mother. Neil was later diagnosed as dyslexic, but it is unlikely that lower schools would have identified the problem in either boy in the 50s or 60s. Even today it is often missed, and learning difficulties are attributed to laziness or poor teaching. Barbara Bush later became dedicated to the cause of literacy and went public with her family's problem, urging parents of dyslexics, "Please don't treat it like a secret. Treat it with help."

Bush has been ridiculed by the media for his malapropisms—DUBYA AS A SECOND LANGUAGE, it was branded by Harper's magazine. "Tactical weapons" becomes condensed into "tacular weapons"; "enthralling" becomes "inebriating"; "handcuffs" turns into "cuff links"; "viable" into "vile"; "basis" into "basics"—as in his revelatory declaration "Reading is the basics for all learning." Thoughts are sometimes scrambled in his sentences, as in "Put food on your family," or in challenging John McCain: "The senator ... can't have it both ways. He can't take the high horse and then claim the low road."

more...

[bif]

18. Because most people aren't total morons.

n/t

[Malva Zebrina]

21. It is really funny that he adopts the accent

No one , neither Jeb, nor Neil nor his daddy nor his mommy have this accent. Yet they all lived in Texas and were grown up in Texas for the same amount of time.