Joseph Cao’s (R, LA-02) charming press release.

Easily the best one that you’ll read all week.  The context: nobody can pronounce the Congressman’s last name properly – up to and including the President (this isn’t a slam: I was getting it wrong, too).  So Joseph decided to set the record straight with a press release:

My last name – Cao – is actually pronounced (drum-roll please…) “Gow.” It starts with a “G” and rhymes (as Amanda Carpenter quipped in the Washington Post) with “Pow.”

I can understand your reluctance to accept such an absurd variation – surely no “C,” in the history of language, has ever been pronounced as a “G.” And yet, through no fault of my own, my native Southern Vietnamese dialect evolved such that this absurd mockery of consonants is, in fact, reality.

The whole thing is worth your time; it’s good from start to finish.  All in all, I’d like to keep Joseph in Congress for a while: how about you?  Thanks to his position as a Republican legislator in a heavily Democratic district, he’s currently under a good deal of pressure to break ranks on health care rationing (he’s already taken hits from the Democrats for not budging for the ‘stimulus’ or cap-and-trade bills): he frankly needs all the help that he can get.

Moe Lane

PS: I keep calling him ‘Joseph’ because he said that we all could.

Crossposted to RedState.