Guess who is "guest" of honor.
Posted on 09/04/2002 4:00:06 PM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - After a month's vacation at his Texas ranch, President Bush let loose at Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on Wednesday with a blast of down-home rhetoric.
"For 11 long years Saddam Hussein has sidestepped, crawfished, wheedled out of any agreement that he had made," Bush told reporters on Wednesday, launching a new verb if not a military strike at Iraq.
Back in Washington after spending August in Texas, Bush was outlining plans to seek the support of Congress and the United Nations for action against Saddam.
"I'm going to call upon the world to recognize that he is stiffing the world," Bush said at a meeting on Iraq with congressional leaders.
Bush's rhetorical blast undoubtedly led to head-scratching in foreign capitals, where he is trying to make his case clear for ousting Saddam.
"Crawfished" refers to the freshwater crustacean -- also known as a crayfish, crawdad or mudbug -- and its knack for scurrying into a hole when discovered.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, asked about the term, rattled off a list of previous Iraqi commitments to disarm.
"This is what Saddam Hussein has tried his best to slither out of, as the president put it, 'to crawfish out of,"' Fleischer said.
"Wheedle" means to entice using flattery or guile.
"Stiffing" means shortchanging, or failing to pay what one owes. Waiters will complain of being stiffed by a diner who leaves a paltry tip.
The president, who has long cloaked his Connecticut Yankee roots with the plain-speaking style of his adoptive Texas, often turns to vivid, folksy language, sometimes of his own invention, when he gets feisty and wants to rally opposition.
In 2001 he said he wanted Islamic militant Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," in the style of an Old West wanted poster. He has denounced the Sept. 11 attackers as "evildoers," and labeled Iraq, Iran and North Korea as part of an "axis of evil."
Off to make dinner!
Actually, to crawfish is to back out of something. If you approach a crawfish, it will kind of stand up and throw its arms up and back up. When you see this, you can kind of visualize a human when he throws his arms up and backs up and says, "Oh no, I'm not going to do that.
Where do you start with this little gem of bias? "Connecticut Yankee?" While that may have been true of his father, GHW Bush moved to Texas in 1951. GW Bush's only formative experience with Connecticut was in college.
And D.C. as well, till they got the Texan-English translation :)
Can't they give the guy a break? Yes, he was born in Connecticut, but he has lived in Texas from the time he was a baby. Hell, I've know adults who moved to Texas, and after a few years they start talking like that too.
Not so! The forty million or so that I have seen over 51 years in the streams of Georgia shot straight backwards when molested like many a salt-water crustacean.
George Walker Bush was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Conn., the eldest son of President George Bush, who was then still a student at Yale. In 1948, the family moved to Odessa, Tex., where the senior Bush went to work in the oil business.
W moved from Connecticut to Texas at the age of two.
The French are so full of sh!t it distorts every uttering they make concerning our president.
They have leurs têtes lèvent leurs anuses .
For those of you in Fleuve Linda, they're as blind as crawdads' clymers.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.