![]() 12-year-old William Figueroa was called to the board to spell "potato." In front of all the cameras, Figueroa dutifully wrote out P-O-T-A-T-O. Sounds like the sort of easy assignment even a doofus couldn't mess up, doesn't it? Not when that doofus was Quayle. Quayle was visiting an elementary school, where teachers let him chair a spelling bee for sixth grade students. It was 1992, the same year President Bush spewed all over the Japanese PM. For a while in the 1990s, young Japanese even had a whole new slang word for chundering: Bushusuru, meaning " to do a Bush." Not only did Bush's embarrassing attempt at bile-based diplomacy become comedic fodder in the US, it made headlines across Japan, too. ![]() Not that anyone cared what his excuse was. It turned out Bush had caught a nasty case of gastroenteritis, exacerbated by his decision to play a hard game of tennis immediately before the dinner. If anyone in Japan still thought the US was cool, that moment probably shattered their illusions forever. At a state dinner, Bush unexpectedly fainted, fell face-first into Miyazawa's crotch, and then vommed all over the poor guy's lap. If Democrats thought groveling before the Japanese leader was bad enough, what came next was even worse. Hostile press said he was kowtowing to Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa. Bush's goal in visiting Tokyo was to reach an agreement that would help shrink America's deficit. ![]() Japan was still in its Bubble Economy period and seemed like the richest, greatest nation on Earth. ![]()
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