Supposedly, George Bush read 40 books this year to Karl Rove’s 64. I’ll believe it when I see the book reports. By all accounts, Bush 43 wasn’t born stupid – his supporters tout his degrees from Yale and Harvard Business School. But Slate had an article a few years back that dissed Bush’s grades as “gentlemen’s C’s” and posits that Bush’s stupidity is voluntary. He’s anti-intellectual and lazy, and simply can’t be bothered to think – and it’s supposedly a Freudian reaction to his father’s achievements.
Rove puffs nostalgically on his magic memory pipe, changing history before our very eyes. Did you know the President is actually a big reader! Yes, he’s read a whole lot of books since “The Pet Goat.”
A glutton for punishment, Mr. Bush insisted on another rematch in 2008. But it will be a three-peat for me: as of today, his total is 40 volumes to my 64. His reading this year included a heavy dose of history — including David Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter,” Rick Atkinson’s “Day of Battle,” Hugh Thomas’s “Spanish Civil War,” Stephen W. Sears’s “Gettysburg” and David King’s “Vienna 1814.” There’s also plenty of biography — including U.S. Grant’s “Personal Memoirs”; Jon Meacham’s “American Lion”; James M. McPherson’s “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” and Jacobo Timerman’s “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.”
Each year, the president also read the Bible from cover to cover, along with a daily devotional.
Via Karl Rove Says George W. Bush Is a Book Lover – WSJ.com
Meanwhile, Slate lays out the case for the President What Chose The Stupid:
But if “numskull” is an imprecise description of the president, it is not altogether inaccurate. Bush may not have been born stupid, but he has achieved stupidity, and now he wears it as a badge of honor. What makes mocking this president fair as well as funny is that Bush is, or at least once was, capable of learning, reading, and thinking. We know he has discipline and can work hard (at least when the goal is reducing his time for a three-mile run). Instead he chose to coast, for most of his life, on name, charm, good looks, and the easy access to capital afforded by family connections.
The most obvious expression of Bush’s choice of ignorance is that, at the age of 57, he knows nothing about policy or history. After years of working as his dad’s spear-chucker in Washington, he didn’t understand the difference between Medicare and Medicaid, the second- and third-largest federal programs. Well into his plans for invading Iraq, Bush still couldn’t get down the distinction between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, the key religious divide in a country he was about to occupy. Though he sometimes carries books for show, he either does not read them or doesn’t absorb anything from them. Bush’s ignorance is so transparent that many of his intimates do not bother to dispute it even in public.
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A second, more damning aspect of Bush’s mind-set is that he doesn’t want to know anything in detail, however important. Since college, he has spilled with contempt for knowledge, equating learning with snobbery and making a joke of his own anti-intellectualism. (“[William F. Buckley] wrote a book at Yale; I read one,” he quipped at a black-tie event.) By O’Neill’s account, Bush could sit through an hourlong presentation about the state of the economy without asking a single question. (“I was bored as hell,” the president shot back, ostensibly in jest.)
Closely related to this aggressive ignorance is a third feature of Bush’s mentality: laziness. Again, this is a lifelong trait. Bush’s college grades were mostly Cs (including a 73 in Introduction to the American Political System). At the start of one term, the star of the Yale football team spotted him in the back row during the shopping period for courses. “Hey! George Bush is in this class!” Calvin Hill shouted to his teammates. “This is the one for us!” As governor of Texas, Bush would take a long break in the middle of his short workday for a run followed by a stretch of video golf or computer solitaire.
A fourth and final quality of Bush’s mind is that it does not think. The president can’t tolerate debate about issues. Offered an option, he makes up his mind quickly and never reconsiders. At an elementary school, a child once asked him whether it was hard to make decisions as president. “Most of the decisions come pretty easily for me, to be frank with you.” By leaping to conclusions based on what he “believes,” Bush avoids contemplating even the most obvious basic contradictions: between his policy of tax cuts and reducing the deficit; between his call for a humble foreign policy based on alliances and his unilateral assertion of American power; between his support for in-vitro fertilization (which destroys embryos) and his opposition to fetal stem-cell research (because it destroys embryos)
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What do I think? I think Bush has always been an “all hat, no cattle,” faux-Texan. I think he was a fair-weather flyboy in the Texas Air National Guard. He liked looking good in a uniform, but didn’t really bother showing up for drill when it was clear his failure to live up to the terms of his military service wouldn’t land him on a Vietnam-bound aircraft carrier. I think he’s always had a calculated genius for generating the right image at the right time; when being a politically connected playboy stopped paying dividends, he straightened up, flew right (literally), and became a Texan cowboy-oilman-baseball club owner. He’s always been an empty suit, or a floating soap bubble. He floated right to the top, and we’re all so much the worse for it.
I just can’t believe Rove thinks people are going to fall for this bullshit… but then Rove has such contempt for ordinary Americans. Only three more weeks and these assholes are GONE.
