When asked at yesterday’s press conference about Amnesty International’s report criticizing America’s treatment of detainees, President Bush called the claims “absurd.” According to the White House transcript, he also said:

In terms of the detainees, we’ve had thousands of people detained. We’ve investigated every single complaint against the detainees. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of — and the allegations — by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble — that means not tell the truth.

What, Dubya? You’re trying to trying to dispel the widely held opinion that you’re a rube? And you think that you can achieve that by appearing professorial as you use a word in a speech that you assume people don’t know, then define it for them? Well, OK, that tactic may seem condescending and blatantly transparent, but you’re the prez. There are just one or two things you may want to consider:

• Make sure you use the right word-definition combination. For instance, disassemble does not mean to “not tell the truth”, but dissemble does.
• To lessen the transparency of the definition tactic, it might be a good idea to not use “Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day” from the previous fucking day.

How did you get into Yale? Oh, never mind, I remember.