Teresa on Making Light has posted the definitive rant on what’s wrong with the Shrub asking if Brazil has black people. Beyond sniggering at yet another gaffe from the election-stealing idiot-savant presidente, Teresa tackles exactly what it means to not know that black people live in Brazil. (Note: There’s some indication that Bush never made this gaffe, as is reported in WashPo. Thanks, Brian!)
Lay that aside for the moment. Let’s go after this question systematically. At minimum, Bush is missing several centuries of the post-Columbus history of the New World. Within that, he’s missing the history of the black Africans’ emigration (kidnapping? diaspora?) to the New World. He can’t know about the triangle trade, which means he has a defective grasp of early North American history, because the triangle trade was a big deal in Colonial times. He doesn’t know anything about the history of Cuba, because if you know even a little about it, you’ll stumble across the fact that there are blacks in Brazil. One somehow feels the Leader of the Free World ought to know something about Cuba, unless the title “Leader of the Free World” is now trading at par with”Holy Roman Emperor.”
Next step: I think this also has to mean that Bush didn’t know there are blacks in all the Latino countries in the Western Hemisphere. Now that he’s been tipped off, he’ll probably claim that he did too know that, but … nope, can’t. If he knew there were blacks in all the other countries, but he didn’t know there were blacks in Brazil, he’d have to have thought Brazil was somehow an exception to the rule. But he can’t have believed that. No sane person could. Brazil has the second-largest black population of any country in the world. (Nigeria’s #1.) So: Bush can’t have known there are black (mulato, actually) populations in every country in the Western Hemisphere. This is depressing when you consider that Latin America is supposedly his area of greatest expertise.