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Reader question:
"In this sentence - Despite his prattle about cutting the deficit, a grudging nod to global climate change, and yet another plea for backup on his Iraq plan, Bush's presidency entered its final phase on life support - what does 'on life support' mean?"

My comments:
"Life support" reminds me of a visit to an ICU (intensive care unit) room in a hospital in Beijing, a few years ago. There I saw how a mechanical respiration system worked.

When I came into the room, doctors had had a tube pushed through the nostril of a dying patient down into his windpipe so that, with the machine turned on, he could be seen breathing as though on his own, the chest rising and falling in rhythm.

The breathing machine, as it is commonly called, is one such thing to put a person "on life support" with. A life support system in the medical field is an apparatus utilized to preserve life after a patient's own body functioning system has begun to fail him.

For once, I saw the breathing machine at work. The patient I saw was put on life support just so that he appeared to be still alive, so that closest relatives and friends could come and see him for the last time, before he was officially declared dead and gone. And that particular patient appeared to be "breathing" strong, but with effort. His chest heaved markedly every time he "breathed in", and he gave out a loud snoring sound all the time. It was all the machine's doing, the snoring along with the heaving.

Very cruel, I sometimes think when I recall that hospital scene. But that is that. You got the analogy. For George Bush's presidency to be declared to be "on life support" is for the writer of that sentence to say that the US President's policies, on Iraq and others, are failing, barely surviving, not at all working.

In other words, the presidency is on its last legs.

Or its days are numbered.

This last expression is literally true - Bush has just about two years to go.

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.