Pun Salad

Jacob Weisberg at Slate has an ongoing "Bushism of the Day" feature. Today's is here, and quoting it in full, it is:

"I tell people, let's don't fear the future, let's shape it."

Now the point of "Bushisms" is to draw attention to the President saying illogical and ungrammatical things. There are people who (apparently) derive loads of amusement from this, and Weisberg has a mini-publishing empire going on the topic:

Click to buy George W. Bushisms: The Slate Book of The Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President; More George W. Bushisms; Still More George W. Bushisms; the Deluxe Election Edition Bushisms; and the George W. Bushisms 2005 Day-to-Day Calendar.

… you have to be a devoted Bushisms fan to buy the 2005 calendar, I suppose, but even if you're tempted, clicking the link shows that it's unavailable from Amazon.

But back to today's quotation. Apparently the thing we're supposed to laugh at is the "let's don't" construction.

The problem is, there's nothing wrong with that. Checking the Google shows that it's very common, with 177,000 hits. And one of those hits is to the appropriate entry in The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, which deems the usage "Standard".

I've remarked before that Weisberg seems pretty desperate to keep this "Bushisms" shtick going. This is just more confirming evidence.

[update: Great minds think alike. Professor Volokh's especially good on Bushisms, and much more polite than I.]