George W Bush’s public speaking skills have improved noticeable during his presidency. Passable is noticeably better than atrocious. But sometimes I’ll bet he rues the confidence he has gained speaking ad lib during press conferences.

Here’s a very funny example, from a press conference yesterday:

The transcript of the relevant section, in which he is speaking about progress in Iraq:

I thought an interesting comment was made, I heard somebody say, you know, “Where’s Mandela?” Well, Mandela’s dead. Because, Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas. You see, he was a brutal tyrant…

The real Nelson Mandela is, as we all know, very much alive and (I trust) well. But the literal-minded anti-Bush crowd is having a field day with this comment, treating it as yet more proof, if any were needed, that Bush is an imbecile. See here, for example, or here.

To those with half a brain, who are able to understand a statement in context (as a spokesperson for the Nelson Mandela Foundation urged listeners to do on Radio 702 earlier today), it seems clear that the question, “Where’s Mandela?” refers not literally to Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, a.k.a. Madiba. Rather, it refers to a peacemaker, a unifier, a conciliatory figure in Iraqi politics. Where is Iraq’s Mandela? In this sense, Bush’s response makes perfect sense. It is biased towards an adult audience, perhaps, because it uses advanced literary devices like figurative speech, but it does make sense.

It may still be wrong, of course, and vulnerable to rational argument. I don’t know whether Saddam did indeed kill all Iraq’s unifying figures. But the statement is not stupid. Here’s some free advice for the over-wrought anti-Bush crowd. If you’re going to argue about Iraq policy and disagree with the Bush administration’s prosecution of that war, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, it would help your cause if you didn’t prove your own pettiness and stupidity first.

If I seem a little distracted, it’s because I am. I’m having fun, all nostalgic for my cool tech toy days when I wrote hardware reviews for PC Report in the early 1990s. After months of struggling to buy a PC in parts, rather than buy a pre-assembled, overpriced, lowest-common-denominator box loaded with an operating system I won’t even bother to boot once, I finally have all the bits and pieces I need. So I’m assembling and installing and downloading and tweaking and fiddling and hoping not to blow the whole thing up.

Actually, I’m one piece short: a little connector that lets me plug a second monitor with a normal VGA cable into the fancy DVI connector on the back of my graphics card. So I go hunt for one. I get told it would cost me about R50 (about $7 — probably $10 by the time you read this). Fine, except that I run into the usual South African IT distribution channel problem: no stock on anything except a basic range of complete machines. The only part I can find that’ll do the job is an Apple Mac component. Of course, it costs R300 ($42.50). Some choice language later, I get the final offer: R200 ($28.30). In the States, I see you can get it for $20 or so.
This, you must understand, is for two plugs and short piece of cable. Very pretty plugs, of course, but prettiness made from moulded white plastic. No wonder Mac users look so smug. When they pay for their cutesey accessories, two thirds of the price buys nothing but a superior smirk. It’s the only way they can cope with that falsehood, that heresy that keeps gnawing at the back of their minds: that somewhere on some babe-crewed yacht in some turquoise paradise, Steve Jobs is snickering.