{"id":6339,"date":"2006-01-14T10:25:48","date_gmt":"2006-01-14T15:25:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6339"},"modified":"2006-01-14T10:25:48","modified_gmt":"2006-01-14T15:25:48","slug":"heck-of-a-phrase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/heck-of-a-phrase\/","title":{"rendered":"Heck of a phrase"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Thursday, Bush participated in a roundtable discussion with small business owners and community leaders in New Orleans, billed as a chance to discuss the progress seen over the last few months. But when the president said the city is “a heck of a place<\/a> to bring your family,” it couldn’t have been too encouraging — in light of Bush’s post-Katrina use of the phrase<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, Bush seems to have developed something of a verbal tick<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On a daily basis, sometimes several times an hour, the word “heck” creeps into President Bush’s public pronouncements. People he wants to praise, as well as places, ideas and winning sports teams, are all told that they are or have done a “heck” of a good thing.<\/p>\n

You might think Bush would have retired the expression after he infamously told the man who led the federal government’s much-criticized response to Hurricane Katrina: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”<\/p>\n

But the verbal quirk has turned up in Bush’s speeches at least four times this week. On Thursday, he used it four times in a 10-minute address.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s used to describe places, legislation, people, baseball teams, and even in dealing with weighty international issues.<\/p>\n

In that same speech, Bush sought to draw a distinction between Western democracy and what he said was the flawed vision of America’s enemies in the battle against terrorism.<\/p>\n

“We’re going to win,” he said. “Our ideology is a heck of a lot more hopeful than theirs.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He’s using a heck of a phrase, but maybe someone could get Bush a thesaurus?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Thursday, Bush participated in a roundtable discussion with small business owners and community leaders in New Orleans, billed as a chance to discuss the progress seen over the last few months. But when the president said the city is “a heck of a place to bring your family,” it couldn’t have been too encouraging […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}