Washington, April 29, 2009 (AP). As President Obama welcomed Senator Arlen Specter into the fold, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said, “The danger of that for the country is that there won’t automatically be an ability to restrain the excess that is typically associated with big majorities and single-party rule.”
This utterance sparked a lively debate among academic language experts and connoisseurs of words, one side arguing that the statement was hypocrisy, while the other maintained it was unselfconscious irony. Other voices brandished thesauri and added pietism, cant, pious fraud, lip-devotion, lip-service, lip-reverence, and sanctimony. Listening intently to this academic debate, former President Bush said, “huh?” and went about his retirement activity of clearing brush from his cerebrum.
In a related story, Mr. Bush, asked about the outbreak of swine flu, said, “That’s like ‘I’ll lend you money when pigs fly, or in the past tense, when swine flew.’ ” Mr. Bush then went back to his retirement activity of arranging his library alphabetically by super hero.
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