United States President George Bush bumbles an analogy meant to link Mandela’s ideology of peace and equality with what was needed in Iraq. Instead the President’s awful gaffe comes off sounding like he was accusing Saddam of killing Nelson Mandela. Mandela is very much alive.

~ As taken from the Coo Yah! section.

Some of you may or may not remember Lauren Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina Teen USA, whose mangled response to a pageant question has become an Internet sensation. The young pageant contestant was asked why she thought a fifth of Americans (according to recent polls) could not locate the U.S. on a world map. A Youtube video of Ms. Upton’s response garnered millions of hits and thousands of harsh comments across the Internet.

Her excuse?

“Everything did come at me at once. I was overwhelmed and I made a mistake. Everybody makes a mistake. I’m human,” … “I seriously think I only heard about one or two words of the actual question.”

Give me a break! To understand my frustrations at her feeble excuse one must first see the video of her response:

Did she say “U.S. Americans” and “the Iraq”?! And how the hell did “South Africa” come into the equation?! In all fairness she claims she did not hear the question. Fine. The obvious problem here, apart from the fact that she did not ask to have the question repeated, is that she could not even arrange a sensible or coherent sentence. I mean seriously… “the Iraq”?!

When the question was asked the first thing I thought was “I know people can be really ignorant sometimes… but there is no way in hell that 20% of Americans cannot locate their own country on a map. No fricking way!” Then Ms. Upton (not to be confused with the Jamaican T.V. personality Ms. Upton from Lime Tree Lane for those old heads in the place) gives her answer and I immediately suspend my disbelief thinking “Ah ha. There’s goes a 20 percenter right there!”

But I really can’t lay the whole blame on her. While I agree that she is individually responsible for her own education to an extent… I believe that the U.S. system of education (as well as her parents) are in part to blame for her embarrassment. According to her former principal, Creig Tyler, the young lady did well in college-prep and honors classes in school and he remembers her as a well-rounded student.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for the tertiary education system in America, which I think takes a more flexible and realistic approach to tertiary education than its British counterpart, but the secondary level education system here needs a serious looking into. I remember my younger cousin coming home and asking me to help her with her homework. She always had some art/craft homework to do even though the subject was algebra or some other unrelated subject. So one day, when curiosity got the better of me, I asked her why all her homework seemed to be of the arts and crafts variety. She told me that all of her teachers gave the students multiple options for homework: the student could either choose the traditional assignment or they could choose to do the visual version of said homework. Instead of actually learning to solve an equation one would draw sheep instead. Puzzling. Then there was all this extra credit, multiple choice tests, take-home exams, and other such tom-foolery that only seemed to give the students tools to get decent grades without actually learning. The students seemed too “spoon fed”.

Just to show you that the apple does not fall far from the tree… check out another great representative of the 20%:

LOL! If a nations leader can’t answer a question even with a simple “I don’t know” or form a coherent sentence then what’s to be expected of the nations followers? Even more surprising is the media attention that’s been given to a teenage beauty pageant contestant and the relative obscurity of the similar gaffe by the President of the World’s greatest superpower. Sheesh… at least she can claim she did not hear the question. What’s President Bush’s excuse?