Smile when you say that, pardner, or it may be wet noodles at 30 paces at dawn....

I am indebted to two individuals for the data in the quiz in the previous post. The statements of President Barack Obama arrived in an email from my 80-something-year-old neighbor, Rube (his real name; it isn’t short for Reuben or anything else). I don’t know where he found them, but I know they are true because I remember hearing the president make them when he made them. The statements of President George W. Bush were compiled by a woman named Sarah Baxter and published in a copyrighted article in The Sunday Times of January 18, 2009.

Okay, here are the answers to the little quiz:

Statements #1 through #10 were uttered by Barack Obama; statements #11 through #30 were uttered by George W. Bush. I purposely didn’t intersperse them because I thought you would think I had [interspersed them] and so I figured that if I didn’t [intersperse them] it would make the game even more fun (translation: difficult) for you.

In a comment, Yorkshire Pudding added another of President Bush’s statements: “Rarely is the questioned asked: Is our children learning?” Good one, YP!

Lord Pudding then implied -- no, he said -- that by including gaffes of both presidents I was participating in the vilification of Barack Obama. I quote from his comment: “Mr. Obama is a far more intelligent man and a more natural orator than George W. Bush ever was. Your amusing quiz puts them on a par - as if they were equally prone to gaffes. That isn’t the case. It is so sad to see, from afar, the vilification of Barack Obama.”

The juxtaposition of those particular sentences is, I think, no accident.

I think Lord Pudding is participating in the vilification of anyone who would even dare to suggest that Mr. Obama is anything less than perfect, a saint, the Savior of the world. Moreover, I think that Lord Pudding’s remarks are a perfect example of the intolerance of the liberal mind toward any but its own thoughts.

Well, I do not want to get into a war of words with Lord Pudding about Barack Obama or anyone else because both of them are world travelers and little old moi has been in only 8 countries and 33 of the 57 states, which is neither here nor there, but if Lord Pudding wants to get into a war of words with me he has -- how shall I put it in a way everyone can understand? -- completely misunderestimated me.

Before Lord Pudding fires off another salvo in my direction, I would like to see him try to diagram the previous sentence.

[P.S. - Did you ever notice that in today’s climate of political correctness it’s absolutely okay to critize people on the right but people on the left, free speech notwithstanding, are supposed to be spared such an atrocity? Well, I for one didn’t care for either Hitler on the right or Stalin on the left. Come to think of it, to believe that fascism is on the right and communism is on the left is to believe that the earth is flat. I have news: the world is round, and tyranny of both extremes eventually meet. And that statement has nothing to do with either Barack Obama or George W. Bush; I just think it needs saying from time to time. --RWP]