Con Coughlin

Don’t misunderestimate Bush’s record

Con Coughlin bids farewell to the 43rd President and says that, for all the verbal muddle and ideological fixations, his achievements were substantial

issue 17 January 2009

Oh, the fun we’ve had. Not since the Reverend William Spooner dumbfounded Oxford undergraduates have we been so entertained by the garbled syntax and grammatical infelicities that have been one of the more diverting features of the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush.

‘Tell me, was it you or your brother that was killed in the war?’, a question Spooner asked a former student after the first world war, could just have easily been posed by Dubya to an American soldier fresh back from fighting on one of the many front lines in the war on terror.

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