Conservatives have a new sound bite. On behalf of all Americans, they are offended by the sound of President Obama's sound bites. (At times, I am too. After all, if "we tortured some folks," then we have a legal and moral responsibility to prosecute some folks.) Rich Lowry, taking a break from seeing starbursts from Sarah Palin, called Obama "callow" for lecturing Congressional Republicans to "stop hatin' all the time." Last week, Peggy Noonan decided she could "keep walking" past torture revelations but not President Obama's speaking style. "He shouldn't be out there dropping his g's, slouching around a podium, complaining about his ill treatment," she protested, "describing his opponents with disdain: 'Stop just hatin' all the time.'" And just 24 hours before Lowry's broadside in Politico, Noonan's Wall Street Journal colleague Daniel Henninger regurgitated the same talking points about the nation's first African-American President dividing the country:

It started with all those weird, dropped "g's." A cranial gong goes off when Barack Obama starts droppin' "g's." The American president who is seen discoursing eloquently at the African leaders summit hits the stump and suddenly he sounds like Gabby Hayes. "Folks like you are havin' a hard time makin' it when the wealthiest are grabbin' it all in for themselves."

Of course, when Lowry, Noonan, Henninger and their ilk accuse Barack Obama of talking in code, they are talking in code. Or to put in terms conservatives might prefer, they are merely confirming our low expectations of their soft bigotry. The Manhattan Institute's resident linguist John McWhorter acknowledged as much, explaining that "it's stupid enough that Obama has to downplay his command of Indonesian to avoid looking like a Muslim; must we jump him for using the Black English spice kit?" (As the President himself put it in a discussion of "acting white," there are "a whole bunch of different ways for African American men to be authentic.") For a modern president, McWhorter argues, "talkin' down is speaking American."
George W. Bush certainly thought so. When he wasn't accidentally waterboarding the English language, Bush would intentionally drop his "g's" and talk about "folks," too. But when it came to "using bad language," Bush lamented in retrospect, it wasn't just a mistake. It was pretty much the only mistake of his presidency.
Of course, during his first term, President Bush thought he had committed no errors at all. One year after his invasion of Iraq and eleven months after his "Mission Accomplished" event aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, at his April 13, 2004 press conference Bush was asked, "After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have learned from it?" His response?

"I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it...You know, I just -- I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with answer, but it hadn't yet."

Of course, the list of Bush calamities, including diverting resources from the unfinished fight against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan to pursue Saddam Hussein mythical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, was already a lengthy one. (Joking about not finding any WMD during the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents Association Dinner would be on it, too.) But near the top of any accounting of Dubya's disasters was Commander-in-Chief Bush's reckless July 2003 challenge to the insurgents rapidly turning Iraq into a bloodbath for American troops and civilians alike:

"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on."

The attackers took Bush at his word. As a grieving Mary Kewatt told Minnesota Public Radio in July 2003:

"We have some issues with the fact that President Bush declared combat over on May 1. Combat is not over. We don't even know who's firing at us right now, and all of our soldiers are at great risk of being picked off as Jim was. And that's a shame. And then President Bush made a comment a week ago, and he said, 'bring it on.' They brought it on and now my nephew is dead."

Even George W. Bush realized he had made a mistake, but just not at the time. But by May 2006, Dubya finally came up with one:

"Saying 'Bring it on.' Kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people. That I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner. You know, "Wanted dead or alive," that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted. And so I learned -- I learned from that."

And in January 2007, just days after he announced the surge in Iraq, Bush admitted to Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes that he had made mistakes, if only semantic ones:

PELLEY: You mention mistakes having been made in your speech. What mistakes are you talking about?
BUSH: You know, we've been through this before. Abu Ghraib was a mistake. Using bad language like, you know, "bring them on" was a mistake. I think history is gonna look back and see a lot of ways we could have done things better. No question about it.

In June 2008 during his final swing through Europe before leaving the White House, President Bush told The Times of London that his cowboy rhetoric was perhaps his greatest regret:

President Bush has admitted to The Times that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he was a "guy really anxious for war" in Iraq.
[...] In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. "I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric."
Phrases such as "bring them on" or "dead or alive", he said, "indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace."

Not a man of peace, and not a very good self-proclaimed "War President," either. After all, for President Bush the importance of getting Osama Bin Laden was always directly proportional to the threat to his own political standing.
Trying to fight back the growing public outcry over his illegal domestic wiretapping program in January 2006, President Bush used the Bin Laden bogeyman during remarks at the National Security Agency:

"All I would ask them to do is listen to the words of Osama bin Laden and take him seriously. When he says he's going to hurt the American people again, or try to, he means it. I take it seriously, and the people of NSA take it seriously."

Bush, of course, did not take Bin Laden so seriously four years earlier. Questioned about his silence regarding Bin Laden in the months following the failure to capture the Al Qaeda chieftain in Tora Bora, a nonchalant Bush on March 13, 2002 downplayed his significance:

"So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you...I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."

Bush may have been embarrassed by his failure to capture Bin Laden in 2002, but by the fall of 2004, he faced the prospect of American voters who seemed to recall the murder of 3,000 of their countrymen. In the third presidential debate with John Kerry, a childlike Bush on October 13, 2004 tried for a "do over" of his statement two and a half years earlier:

"Gosh, I just don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden. It's kind of one of those exaggerations. Of course we're worried about Osama bin Laden."

Which brings us full circle. In the aftermath of 9/11, President Bush used the specter of Osama Bin Laden to rally what had been a faltering presidency. In a show of frontier bravado, Bush talked tough about Bin Laden just days after the 9/11 attacks:

"There's an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.'"

By November 2009, ex-President George W. Bush seemed to take great comfort in knowing that Osama Bin Laden could no longer either help or hurt him politically.

Asked whether al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden could be alive, Bush said "I guess he is not dead."
He, however, noted that Laden is hiding and "not leading victory parades" or "espousing his cause" on TV.
He expressed confidence that Laden will be brought to justice which "he deserves to be" and it was a matter of time.

Just not George Bush's time. Instead, it was President Barack Obama who could rightly proclaim mission accomplished. (Of course, Obama never put it that way--and never appeared wearing a codpiece on the deck of an aircraft carrier, either.) For her part, Peggy Noonan suggested President Obama could be lying and demanded he release photographs of the dead Bin Laden. And in 2012 when Obama rightfully boasted of his decision to take out Bin Laden--a decision that George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney all said during the 2008 campaign they would not make--conservatives blasted the President for "spiking the ball." As McCain put it, "Shame on Barack Obama" for a "pathetic, political act of self-congratulation."
Now, Henninger, Lowry and company have returned to brand Obama's "talkin' blues" a sign of the "pettiness" of a "puny" President. A lotta folks would disagree, including George W. Bush, the Yale educated son of an aristocratic Northeastern family. He dropped his "g's" and said "folks" all the time. (Despite his promises to stop, President Bush also liked to drop the "ic" from "Democrat Party.") But only a truly puny President would say that "using bad language" was the only real mistake of his catastrophic tenure.