Everyone is much amusing by our President’s proclivity for finding things ‘unacceptable’. (As in: you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does.) I got curious whether anyone had made the obvious inversion of Teddy R’s wisdom. Turns out Josh Marshall said it, back in early 2003:
Speak softly and carry a big stick. Or, speak loudly and carry a big stick. Or maybe even speak softly and get by with a small stick. But, for God’s sake, don’t speak loudly and carry a small stick. And yet that’s precisely what President Bush has been doing on the Korean Peninsula issue for two years …
Wait, it’s coming to me in a vision: speak sensibly, and carry a medium-sized stick and a medium-sized carrot (which was the fashion at the time). Damn, we all pretty much miss the Clinton years, don’t we? (You can make jokes about Clinton’s carrot if you like. Doesn’t change a thing.)
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From what I recall, Clinton actually carried a cucumber.
“You can make jokes about Clinton’s carrot if you like. Doesn’t change a thing.”
Nice preemption.
Shut up and pretend you don’t have a stick.
Whether Clinton wielded a zucchini, a carrot or a cuke, it’s clear that he (or any president or prime minister of an assortment of nations), no matter how small his (or her) army, wields an impressive array of weapons of the category nuke.
Which is why our nations continue to negotiate with North Korea, and why we mere citizens continue to hope that our nation(s) won’t attack Iran just because ayatollahs are scarier than commissars.
We can’t use the nuke, and it’s not just that Japan would object to our using nuclear weapons again, is it?
Yes, apparently Bush’s “Stick” is quite small I just had to say that sorry :( .
President Clinton, as I recall it, became most famous for using a cigar.
Regarding political speak, though on a smaller scale, I recently noted that the Danish prime minister took to repeating the phrase “jeg er nødt til at sige, at…” (in English roughly “I have to say that…” or “I am forced to say that…”) in a speech where he addressed complaints about changes in the financing of local government authorities (In a Danish context this issue is just as complicated and potentially even more deadly than Iraq).
The aim was obviously to depict his counterparts (mayors, the Local Government Association, Social Democrats, the ususal suspects, etc) as people who wouldn’t stand by an agreement and thus forcing the PM to state the obivous, but when the phrase appeared something like eight times in one minute during the speech, I started to find it not just annoying, but unacceptable.
The Dalek Emperor: ‘Reasons are irrelevant. Failure is unacceptable.’
Help! Stick… metaphor… overload.
Pretzels can be effective dangerous too.
Pretzels can be pretty effective too.
“…our President’s proclivity …’
Not my President, thanks very much.
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