Not a gaffe

I saw the headline which said Bush had made another gaffe and had accidentially stated Nelson Mandela was dead.  Now Bush does make lots of gaffes, and I am not saying he doesn’t.  But in this case, I don’t see how it is a gaffe – it was an analogy which no intelligent person could confuse.

In a speech defending his administration’s Iraq policy, Bush said former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s brutality had made it impossible for a unifying leader to emerge and stop the sectarian violence that has engulfed the Middle Eastern nation.

“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.

It is very clear he is using the name Mandela as a term for charismatic unifying leaders.