"I think we agree, the past is over." – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on meeting with John McCain May 10, 2000.I know this: 100% will get it if I'm the president." Examples General īush's statements were also notorious for their ability to state the opposite of what he intended, with notable examples including his remarks on the estate tax, "I'm not sure 80% of people get the death tax. In Hennessey's view, Bush "intentionally aimed his public image at average Americans rather than at Cambridge or Upper East Side elites". Stanford Graduate School lecturer and former Bush economic policy advisor Keith Hennessey has argued that the number of Bush's verbal gaffes is not unusual given the significant amount of time that he has spoken in public, and that Barack Obama's miscues are not as scrutinized. If this is true for Bush it hasn't yet become obvious. I know from my teaching experience that nature very often compensates the dyslexic with a higher IQ or some grant of intuitive intelligence. The poor guy is obviously dyslexic, and dyslexic to the point of near-illiteracy. All those jokes and cartoons and websites about his gaffes, bungles and malapropisms? We've been unknowingly teasing the afflicted. Bush, by my friend and colleague Gail Sheehy, in this month's Vanity Fair. So I kicked myself hard when I read the profile of Governor George W. I used to have the job of tutoring a dyslexic child, and I know something about the symptoms. Journalist and pundit Christopher Hitchens published an essay in The Nation titled "Why Dubya Can't Read", writing: Bush said "misunderestimated" in a speech, Philip Hensher called the term one of his "most memorable additions to the language, and an incidentally expressive one: it may be that we rather needed a word for 'to underestimate by mistake'." Which of us could stand up to a similar level of linguistic scrutiny?". Linguist Mark Liberman of Language Log has suggested that Bush is not unusually error-prone in his speech, saying: "You can make any public figure sound like a boob, if you record everything he says and set hundreds of hostile observers to combing the transcripts for disfluencies, malapropisms, word formation errors and examples of non-standard pronunciation or usage. Various public figures and humorists, such as Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and Garry Trudeau, creator of the comic strip Doonesbury, have popularized some more famous Bushisms. A poem entitled " Make the Pie Higher", composed entirely of Bushisms, was compiled by cartoonist Richard Thompson. Bush's use of the English language in formal and public speeches has spawned several books that document the statements.