Jeez. It's come to this. I need to defend Bush against unfair attacks from Andy McCarthy. At a press conference today, Bush said "Elected leaders cannot have one foot in the camp of democracy and one foot in the camp of terror." McCarthy goes on to slam him on the grounds that it is, in fact, possible for leaders to have one foot in each camp.

Speakers of the English language will, however, have no trouble seeing what the president was saying. I might say, for example, "you can't just go around misconstruing the president's statements." Obviously, though, you can do that just as McCarthy it. Bush was using "can" in a normative sense meaning something like "it's not acceptable for elected leaders to have one foot in the camp of democracy and one foot in the camp of terror."