Mandela and David Brent.

This is one of those moments of unintended comedy that only having a genuinely embarrassing national leader can provide:


"Nelson Mandela is still very much alive despite an embarrassing gaffe by U.S. President George W. Bush, who alluded to the former South African leader's death in an attempt to explain sectarian violence in Iraq.

"'It's out there. All we can do is reassure people, especially South Africans, that President Mandela is alive,' Achmat Dangor, chief executive officer of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said as Bush's comments received worldwide coverage...

"'I heard somebody say, Where's Mandela?' Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas,' Bush, who has a reputation for verbal faux pas, said in a press conference in Washington on Thursday...

"References to his death -- Mandela is now 89 and increasingly frail -- are seen as insensitive in South Africa."


Some highlights from this excruciating press conference can be seen below. Viewing it requires a taste for punishment and is not recommended for the easily depressed.

Now quite obviously Bush was not literally suggesting that Nelson Mandela was dead -- to be certain he neither knows nor cares the least thing about Mandela -- but was rather attempting (struggling and failing might be a better term) to say that Iraq's potential Mandelas, i.e. unifying social leaders, are all dead.

The analogy itself is hopelessly flawed, suggesting that Bush has little or no understanding of what Mandela actually did -- he picked the name up somewhere, thought it sounded good. There also hovers the question of how many "Mandelas" might also have been killed in the mismanaged chaos since Hussein's fall, not to mention the rather unflattering implication underlying Bush's statement that those Iraqis that survived Hussein are a pack of do-nothings unlikely to pick up the ball. But at least we can grant Bush enough credit to perceive that he was making no statement regarding the health and survival about the actual Nelson Mandela.

But misunderstandings snowball, don't they... we recall a charming exchange between a former German president and the just-arrived president of India. Attempting to say a friendly "How are you?" in greeting, the German leader stumbled on the language and instead said "Who are you?" To which the President of India, not unnaturally, replied, "I am the President of India." A delicate pause of mutual confusion ensued.

Thus the not-unnatural response to this blundering statement, as we painfully dig our way out of yet another presidential wordslide. Note the wry tone of that headline: "Mandela still alive despite..."

It's not amusing for South Africans of course, in light of Mr. Mandela's health. Nor is it amusing to recall that the President of the United States believes in his own garbled reasoning enough to continue sending people to their deaths. Yet more and more these days we think of David Brent, the self-important, agonizingly foolish office manager created by Ricky Gervais on the BBC's original "The Office." Like Brent, Bush is an inarticulate man fumbling his way through a position of leadership, one who is under the painful delusion that his ignorance makes him entertaining, likeable, and worthy of respect.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States: