A presidential candidate said this in an exchange after a speech (video here):

You know, I don’t understand when people are going around worrying about, “We need to have English-only.” They want to pass a law, “We want English-only.”

Now, I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But understand this. Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they’ll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about, how can your child become bilingual? We should have every child speaking more than one language.

You know, it’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and all we can say, “Merci beaucoup.” Right?

Was that FDR, Eisenhower, or maybe Ambassador Ben Franklin saying such a thing? Hmmm. Reading these comments of the candidate, the words très gauche come to mind — perhaps for more than one reason.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.