Teribus, one of my areas of study at the University of Washington was English, both literature and composition, so I think I am fairly adept at both reading and writing the English language, and parsing a sentence is no challenge for me. I also studied philosophy in general (an ongoing study), but concentrated especially on the areas of ethics and logic. These are particular fields of interest to me. In addition to this, I worked for many years as a technical writer. Within recent years I have had some seventeen articles on various topics published in regional and national magazines and have nearly completed a book-length work of non-fiction (approximately 100,000 words so far).

So I'm pretty well qualified to understand what Bush said (although his command of the English language is high school level at best, and were it not for his speech writers, he would babble incoherently, as we have seen during his press conferences—which is one of a couple of reasons he doesn't hold them anymore; another being that he doesn't like a lot of the pointed questions reporters tend to ask).

In the segment of his 2002 State of the Union speech cited, he is referring to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an "axis of evil," along with any other country or countries that might ally themselves with those three.

You seem to be the one having difficulty with reading comprehension, Teribus. Or, more likely, your reading comprehension is fine, but you simply can't accept the obvious fact that you are so obviously and demonstrably dead wrong.

Good Lord, man, get a grip!!

Don Firth