Regardless of your political persuasion, no matter how far to the left or to the right your beliefs may fall, there's no disputing the fact that George W. Bush has a strange way with words and a penchant for tasting his foot in public. Being that the President's speeches fall into the public domain, it should surprise no one that a compilation of W's finest blunders has made its way to home video so that you can enjoy them over and over again in the privacy of your own home.

So, with that out of the way, what exactly are George W. Bushism? Well, the filmmakers have based this presentation on the book Bushism which is a collection of all the strange things that the president has said over the last few years. From 'You work hard to put food on your family' to 'She was a little girl who went to school in Texas, just like me!' there are no shortage of strange quotes to capture and in written form, these probably work really well. The challenge they face is in bringing this over to DVD and making it work visually, seeing as they're limited in what clips they have access to.

To make this more than just a collection of new snippets, there's commentary provided by Al Franken, and Jacob Weisburg, as well as from host Brian Unger. Basically, once they play a clip of W saying something goofy, they follow it with a witty remark or observation from one of the three pundits. More often than not these are pretty funny follow ups, and all three men have obviously put some thought into examining and translating some of the President's more cryptic remarks.

When the video sticks to this format, it's gold.

Sadly, in order to pad out the running time and squeeze and hour out of twenty minutes worth of material, they felt the need to insert some very overplayed animated clips, some George W. Bush dictionary segments (in which W uses a nonsensical word like 'subliminable' in a sentence) and a couple of Doonesbury comics courtesy of the brilliant cartoonist Gary Trudeau. The comics are funny, but reading them on your TV screen just feels weird and some of the effect is lost by the fact that the camera pans from frame to frame very slowly and it takes awhile to get through what should be a quick, funny segment.

To add insult to injury they've also thrown in four musical numbers from the George W. Bush singers. The premise behind this is that a group of vocalists all sing a rather repetitive song based around a couple of sound bites of W saying something strange. These might be funny if they were a minute long or so but most of these are a lot longer than that and the repetition quickly becomes rather tedious and wears out its welcome.

In short, as a collection of news clips with commentary from some intelligent and funny men as follow up, this DVD would be great. But with the 'added' material thrown in to pad it out, it seems disjointed and unfortunately the humor at times becomes monotonous and a lot of the effect is lost in the corny cartoons and bad song parodies.

Video:

Well, the 1.33.1 fullframe image is a bit of a mixed bag. The newer footage shot specifically for this presentation on video looks pretty good. There is some mild edge enhancement but other than that, there are no real problems with it. A few of the archival clips of the President in action look a little worse for wear and they do show some loss in picture quality, though most of the don't suffer too badly. The Doonesbury comic strip segments though are very shimmery looking and suffer from really bad edge enhancement, making it almost hard on the eyes to read the text balloons. Overall, the image is decent, but it could have been better.