JIANGISM OF THE DAY? Eugene Volokh has castigated Slate’s “Bushism of the Day” feature for sloppiness and out-of-context quotes before, but today Best of the Web says that Slate is charging Bush with fractured English that came, in fact, from Jiang Zemin.
I know that some journalists regard Texan English as something like a foreign language, but it seems unfair to confuse Bush with a native speaker of Chinese.
UPDATE: Slate has run a correction, which says that the error was originally the AP’s. I wonder, though: If you’re going to try to find an example of sloppiness every day (for the “Bushism of the Day” feature) you’re inevitably going to have a problem with uneven material, which means you’re going to make boners like this on a regular basis. Slate’s feature has been uneven at best, and has started to make Slate look worse than Bush. And this is something that should have been predictable from the outset. So why’d they do this? And why are they still doing it?