Eighth Grade English that is. Dumb Don Trump hired Sean Spicer to manage his relations with the global media. He must have interviewed the man, gotten inanities by the yard and hired him anyway. This makes Don 100% responsible for Spicer’s illiterate gibberish. And the trouble he gets us into.
How bad is it?
Spicer was asked by reporters if Dumb Don is a subject in the Kremlingate investigation as he claims he is. Instead of saying “no,” Spicer said, “there is no reason to believe there is any type of investigation with respect to the Department of Justice.”
“With respect to” says that the President is investigating the Justice Department, not the other way around. The correct word is “by.” Better to say, ”We do not believe that the Justice Department is investigating the President.” Twelve words eliminate nineteen words of ambiguous piffle.
Later, Spicer had to admit that his boss had not asked the Justice Department if he was being investigated and, truth to be told, didn’t know the answer.
When asked to square his two comments, Spicer let loose this nuttiness.
“I said I’m not aware and we’re not aware and that’s why we want the House and Senate to do what the president has asked of them, to look into this.”
Hmmm…
“I’m not aware” ≠ “There is no reason to believe.” We have to be "aware" in the first instance in order to know whether or not we have a "reason to believe" in the second. Therefore, saying that “We’re not aware” precludes any reason to “want” Congress to “look into” anything. We cannot want things of which we are unaware and of which, therefore, we are ignorant.
Spicer could have avoided all this by saying from the first, “We don’t know.”
America has an illiterate bumpkin (two actually) speaking for the country in front of global media.
How big is this problem? Imagine that you are translating Spicer’s blather for foreign consumption. First, you must translate it into English. Publius has demonstrated here, as he did earlier with Dumb Don’s grammatical incoherence, that Spicer’s words don't work in our language.
As we see every time he opens his mouth, Spicer's grammar is so bad that, like Don, his words collapse into nonsense the second he utters them. It is impossible to translate Spicer or his boss into English without altering what they say into something that we cannot be sure that they mean.
Publius' favorite example is Don's August 15th campaign speech on security which hung in its entirety on a single sentence with twelve errors. To translate Don's security policy into English, therefore, it must be rethought from scratch. But, by whom? We know that Don is not capable of doing this himself and that he cannot understand the logic of others. So, there is no way anyone can ever make sense in another language of Don's nonsense in English.
Take French. You can read almost anything in French and the logic is close enough to English to make translation reasonably fast and accurate. So, translating Spicer and his boss into French should be easy. But, because you can't figure out what they are saying in English, it is impossible.
Now, take Japanese, which is preposition-driven. “I like to drive my car” becomes, “I of, car as for, drive definite, like does.” Translate Sean Spicer’s inanities onto that sequence and ask if our policies are clear to the Japanese. The Koreans use the same structure and we are on the brink of war there. Spicer's babble is just what we need to minimize our risks. Happy 1941 everybody!!
Let's step this up a bit. Move from written translation to simultaneous translation where as a translator you have no time to think through any of this. You translate in real time and, irrespective of what Don and Spicer mean, whatever comes out of your mouth is U.S. policy.
The bottom line: Sean Spicer is so illiterate that he could cause a war just by stumbling through a press briefing and being mistranslated into English. Forget another language.
Spicer and his boss are trying to recover their endless series of illiterate fumbles by dividing the media into two: the literate and the illiterate.
The literate media, like the New York Times and Washington Post, are the enemies who must be excluded from Spicer’s briefings. The illiterates, like Breitbart, are welcome because they don’t know what Spicer said, don’t know what questions to ask and so don’t.
It also helps to cut live video of White House briefings to minimize Spicer’s huge and high-risk exposure to simultaneous translation.
Who hired this guy? Dumb Don. Who needs to be fired? You got it.
Follow-up
March 14, 2017
Spicer gets Dumb Don into more trouble every day. On March 4, Trump announced several times over a 30 minute period on Twitter that he was a subject in the Kremlingate investigation and that the FBI was monitoring his phone calls. Under pressure to debunk his boss' self-incrimination, Spicer instead told the media that Don was being monitored on way more devices than his phone!!
April 12, 2017
Spicer's latest bit of foolery was to claim yesterday that Adolf Hitler "didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.” To Publius, this bizarre assertion comes as no surprise. Spicer's lack of education in English means that he couldn't read about what Hitler did or did not do even if he tried. There is no way, therefore, that Spicer can know what he is talking about on this subject. Or, for that matter, any other.
July 21, 2017
Spicer Day!! Sean gets fired. As always, Publius calls it.