Letting the flies in
The Justice Department’s door is open if President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, wants to pass along information from Ukraine connected with Joe Biden and his family, Attorney General William Barr said Monday.
Why? Why is the door open?
“As I did say to Senator Graham, we have to be very careful with respect to any information from the Ukraine,” Barr said. “There are a lot of agendas in the Ukraine, a lot of cross currents, and we can’t take anything we receive from Ukraine at face value.”
Seeing as how it might be coming not from Ukraine but from Putin’s bag of tricks. Good call.
And also that Ukraine might see fit to curry favor with POTUS.
Barr is trying to poison the well with respect to all things Ukraine, and it’s obvious that he’s doing so to help Trump.
He can’t even be arsed to get the name of the country right. (Small point, I know, but still….)
Why do so many supposedly educated and informed officials, politicians and journalists keep adding ‘the’ in front of Ukraine? Does Barr (or anyone else) go around talking about The Tennessee, or The California?
Well, we do say “The United States” “The United Kingdom”. Maybe he’s just confused. But being confused is not what you want to be in their position. It’s one thing for my students, just embarking on their college career, still learning how things work, but for a person in a high level government position…but, he works for The Donald. Need I say more?
iknklast, I think your explanation of confusion (and implied ignorance?) works fine. both The united States and The united Kingdom are of course abbreviations referring to a collection of more than one state/country. These people should know this.
It used to be called “the Ukraine” in the west. Like Congo (either one) used to be called “the Congo”. I agree that people should know this, but the change happened relatively recently (within my adult lifetime), so I personally forget, and I expect others do, too. No excuse for journalists and others who are supposed to be on top of this information and not make these mistakes.
According to the article below, the only two country names that retain a definite article are The Bahamas and The Gambia (the latter one I can never remember to put in the definite article). They mention:
“There are many other country names that are habitually referred to with “the”, such as Congo, Gambia, Yemen, Lebanon, Sudan, Netherlands, Philippines and Bahamas.”
And all but two are no longer supposed to use the definite article.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18233844
Sackbut,
There’s also El Salvador.
More seriously, in some languages it’s more common to use an article with a country’s name (La France, for example).
But with Ukraine so much in the news these days, there’s no excuse for someone like Barr not to know its name. Actually, let me amend that: there’s no excuse for Barr.
At least he doesn’t call it Bangladesh. ;-)
Ha!