Why I used 'nightmare' line on air

Let me explain my ‘nightmare’ comment during Wednesday night’s programme. I’m aware it has been picked up by Daniel Finklestein on the Times website, among others.

I’d actually had a conversation with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd just before we went on air in which she used a pithy phrase about the ‘end of the nightmare of the Bush Presidency, the beginning of a new nightmare reporting Mr Perfection’.

I was trying to prompt her to use her phrase again during the live interview but unfortunately it sounded as if it were my own line.

The ‘nightmare’ reference has been part of the political lexicon in the United States since the satirical weekly ‘TheOnion.com’ used the headline Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’ in January 2001 just before President Bush took office.

You’ll see it cropped up in a piece I linked to in this posting on Wednesday morning ahead of the programme.

I appreciate that a British audience wouldn’t be familiar with that context, and the choice of words no doubt seemed rather odd. Bit too ‘inside the Beltway’.