Perino blasts ‘offensive’ question after Bush speech snafu

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino on Tuesday called a question that indicated President Bush might have trouble pronouncing foreign countries’ names “offensive.”

{mosads}The issue arose after the United Nations posted a draft of Bush’s speech to the General Assembly on its website, complete with phonetic spellings of countries that the president spoke about. Perino rebuked a reporter for asking if Bush had “a hard time pronouncing some of these countries’ name[s.]”

“I think that’s a offensive question. I’m going to just decline to comment on it,” Perino said.

The spokeswoman noted that including the phonetic spellings of names in a text of an address the president delivers is not an extraordinary step.

“That’s not unusual,” Perino told reporters in New York. “We do that for many speeches.”