Sunday, November 06, 2005

A billion people get footnoted

As we've noted before, sic is an important weapon in the hands of White House transcribers (and no, we don't mean the pundits, but the people who actually textify what Bush says). But they had to bring in reenforcements today -- specifically an asterisk. The context: Dubya is in Brasilia, meeting with Lula, and at the public remarks, he said:

We're the two largest democracies in the world.

Which in the transcript appears as

We're the two largest democracies in the world [sic]*.

Because of course, it's wrong, the obvious counterexample being India. So let's see about that asterisk:

* Western world

Not a bad save, but can it be that in Dubya's mind, democracy for non-Christian people is something different?

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