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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 August 2009
Oh? who?
Appearing Friday in the Rose Garden with Canada's prime minister, President Bush was answering a reporter's question about Canada's role in Iraq when suddenly he swerved into this extraneous thought:
There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily – are a different color than white can self-govern.
What does such careless talk say about the mind of this administration? Note that the clearly implied antecedent of the pronoun “ours” is “Americans.” So the president seemed to be saying that white is, and brown is not, the color of Americans' skin. He does not mean that. But that is the sort of swamp one wanders into when trying to deflect doubts about policy by caricaturing and discrediting the doubters.
Scott McClellan, the president's press secretary, later said the president meant only that “there are some in the world that think that some people can't be free” or “can't live in freedom.” The president meant that “some Middle Eastern countries – that the people in those Middle Eastern countries cannot be free.”
Perhaps that, which is problematic enough, is what the president meant.
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