President Bush: [pronounced "DOOSH-Bahg"]

President Bush suffered some embarrassment at the UN recently. No, he didn’t get caught buying a bag of blow from the South American delegates again. Instead, a White House staffer accidentally released a draft version of the President’s speech to the UN, and, wouldn’t you know it, Dubya doesn’t read so well or know so much about places not called “America.” The speech was peppered with phonetic pronunciations of foreign countries and leaders:

[T]he White House released a draft version of the President’s speech to the annual United Nations General Assembly, [and] a glimpse of how the President sees his speeches was accidentally placed on the UN website. . . .

Pronunciations for President Bush’s friend French President Sarkozy “[sar-KOzee]” appeared in draft #20 on the UN website. Other pronunciations included the Mugabe “[moo-GAHbee] regime” and pronunciations for countries “Kyrgyzstan [KEYRgeez-stan]” and “Mauritania [moor-EH-tain-ee-a].”

Man, that’s embarrassing. Not as bad as releasing Dick Cheney’s draft recipe for delicious cooked baby stew —the early version before the Vice President added extra teaspoons of bile and fear-induced tears—- but still pretty awkward.

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino—a woman who speaks so poorly it seems her only qualification is NOT dying of cancer— refused to answer questions about President Bush’s pronunciation difficulties, saying the inquiries were “offensive.”

Not as offensive as having the most powerful man in the world, making decisions about who lives and dies in far off lands without any grounding in geography or words, but still, y’know, rude.

All things considered, I think Bush is relieved no one released the draft of his last State of the Union address. The one where “Iraq” was spelled [“quagmire,”] and Hussein was spelled [“NOT Bin Laden.”]