How To Parse Bush-Speak

How To Parse Bush-Speak

I don’t know if young people today have ever heard of Pig Latin, but when I was a kid we played around with this coded version of English. We would take the first letter or sound of a word and put it at the end of the word and tack on the sound of “ay.” For example the word “Latin” would become “atin-lay.” The sentence, “Please speak clearly,” would become, “lease-pay peak-say learly-cay.”

You may have noticed that sometimes politicians seem to speak similar nonsense. The difference is that the words they speak are common English words, but the meaning may be hidden by flawed logic or disinformation. Whether it be due to simplemindedness or innocent ignorance, or some other motive more nefarious, the result is the same--we are misled.

The current President of the United States has developed this political art to an exquisite level. I will leave it to others to judge this gentleman’s integrity and moral intentions. I just want to know how to read him when he speaks to us. I believe I have stumbled upon a simple formula for decoding the President’s messages to us. It is a matter of parsing. Technically, parsing means sorting through the grammatical use of words in a sentence. But I intend it here as a means of parsing our Chief Articulator’s phrases or key statements to see how he uses them in his speeches. He speaks clearly enough and without complication. Indeed, as criticism mounts, his tendency to stand his ground makes his phrases almost sound like mantras. This makes it easier to see patterns. Once the code is broken, we wonder why we didn’t see it sooner.

Here is the key. In six years of listening I have learned that all you need to do is reverse the meaning the President’s words seem to convey, and he suddenly makes consistent (non)sense.
Here are some examples, and you will see the pattern.

Weapons of mass destruction.
- Based on what information we now know the President had when he first spoke of these,
what he meant was that the weapons he had no knowledge of are the ones that he was telling
us he knew of.

Saddam Hussein had connections with Al Qaeda.
- Because it was no secret that any connections were tenuous to nonexistent, what he meant
was Al Qaeda attacked us, so we must attack Hussein, who had connections to what he had
nothing to do with.

Torturing prisoners.
- Because pictures of torturing were available on the internet of all places, not to mention the
evening TV news, the President had trouble with this one. This came out before he could
pronounce on it. The best he could do was say, we did it but we don’t do it, which is a kind of
double reversal--acknowledging that we did what we don’t do before denying we do it.

Secret foreign prisons.
- Responding to charges that these surrogate torture locations existed, what the President
meant--as it turned out-- was, right now they don‘t exist because I haven’t decided to tell
you about their existence yet.

Outing of a CIA agent’s identity.
- The President said he would fire any Administration personnel found to be involved in the
leak of Valerie Plame’s identity. What he meant was he would do this theoretically, but he
wouldn’t actually have to because Chief-of-Staff-type scapegoats are available (Libby). (I
guess Carl Rove exists only in my imagination.)

Cooperation.
- When he says his people will cooperate with Congressional investigations, he means over his
(politically) dead body, a political demise which is effectively in progress.

Honesty.
- When he insists that Alberto Gonzales is honest, he actually means honesty as defined by how
good ones memory is, which is an antonym.

So breaking the code and understanding Bush’s grammar turns out to be surprisingly
simple. Just take the reverse of what he says. Give it the necessary twist, and you can
understand what is going on in the administration before the investigative reporters and the
prosecuting attorneys have done their work. You don’t need cutting edge technology, insider
reports, retired generals, or even disillusioned Republicans. It’s right out there in front of us.

Now that we have reduced Bush-speak to plain language, the President might want to polish up on his Pig Latin.

Doug Good