The following story, which astute political analyst Richard Baehr brought to my attention, is a real “hah!” story. And by “hah!” I mean a triumphant exclamation. Here’s the story:
Two of Washington’s best-informed men confirmed it so it must be true. President Bush and his consigliere Karl Rove bet on who had read the most books in a year. Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told friends Rove won with 117 books and Bush was a close second with 104 books.
Unhappy over his loss to his close confidant, Bush asked for a recount — in words. And the president won by 1.7 percent. The story is not apocryphal. In fact, none other than McConnell’s predecessor as the nation’s top spymaster, John Negroponte, now deputy secretary of state, confirmed it. The president, he explained, reads two to three books a week and does not watch television. Most of them are history and biographies of famous statesmen (and three stateswomen who took their countries to war, namely Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, Israel’s Golda Meir and India’s Indira Gandhi).
Bush identifies with George Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Truman and on the other side of the pond, Winston Churchill, all men of courage who did what was right when it was most difficult. From the order to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed instantly 150,000 Japanese to avoid the loss of an estimated 1 million American lives in an invasion of Japan; to the recognition of the state of Israel against the advice of World War II’s most prestigious military leader, Secretary of State George C. Marshall; to the decision to repel North Korea’s invasion of South Korea; to the firing of the immensely popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur for disobeying the president; to Ronald Reagan’s defeat of the evil Soviet Empire, Mr. Bush sees his decision to invade Iraq in the same historical league.
President Bush showed a recent visitor a portrait of Lincoln to talk about the tremendous odds that president encountered in his decision to go to civil war to free the slaves. Bush had done something roughly comparable in his decision to free 26 million Iraqi slaves from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny.
Bush’s model for resisting and defeating Islamist extremism’s global campaign to restore the caliphate and destroy Christendom is Churchill. Isolated in the 1930s on the back benches of parliament, his clarion calls for backbone against Hitler’s Europewide ambitions went unheeded until World War II broke out Sept. 1, 1939 — and then still didn’t get the draft to lead until the Nazi blitzkrieg in May 1940.
Read the rest here.
I’m impressed. To have the kind of demanding job the President has, and still to manage to read 104 books in a year is quite a feat. I read more books than that, but I’ll be the first to admit both that I have a much less onerous job and that I interlard my serious books with frivolous reading that I would never boast about (although I do blog about it).
In any event, I love the story primarily because it highlights what I’ve suspected all along, and what the media so assiduously obscures — namely, that the President is no fool. You can giggle at his malapropisms, but you should never mistake a bumbling tongue for a stupid or ill-informed brain. This is a man who knows his history, and who thinks about things. Sadly, the endless jokes about Bush’s stupidity seep much more deeply into the popular consciousness (witness Mr. Bookworm’s comment this morning), than do the actual facts about the man’s knowledge and analytical abilities.
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Hi BW,
If you get a chance, visit http://www.ejectejecteject.com and read the post from November 6, 2006, titled: SEEING THE UNSEEN Part 1.
Long article, but worth your time. He brings up some rather interesting points concerning President Bush and his intellect.
-Jack
The president, he explained, reads two to three books a week and does not watch television.
That does sound like Bush. Television is so old school. It can be replaced by the internet if you so choose. But Bush looks like someone who doesn’t replace it with the net, and that’s kind of bad, because books are themselves not enough. If Bookworm here just read and read, and never talked like the talker and writer she is… bad things could happen!
Most of them are history and biographies of famous statesmen (and three stateswomen who took their countries to war, namely Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, Israel’s Golda Meir and India’s Indira Gandhi).
That part I don’t really understand. If Bush understands the decisions Lincoln made, then Bush must have made a conscious decision not to do the same thing. And that motivation certainly must have come from his compassionate conservative ideology. It wasn’t from Lincoln that was for sure.
Check out Neo’s site for one of her latest posts about selling Bush hate, Book. You two are synched together… again.
How can such things be? Bush, the idiot, reads more books in a year than Clinton, the Rhodes scholar, lies about having read. But Bush is an idiot! Clever people say so and you can find their books in the remainder bin or buy them at discount prices through the mail from Edward Hamilton, Bookseller. It’s perfectly evident Bush is an idiot the way he mangles language when he speaks except when he’s lying us into a war for oil. This must be some form of propaganda. Perhaps he only reads the dust covers. I mean, Bush can’t be bright. Can’t be studious. Can’t actually think. That’s impossible. That’s like saying Al Gore doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he talks about Global Warming.
I bet I can tell you the response:
“So he read every word in them. Did he color inside all the lines, too?”
As Zhombre points out, the idea that Bush is stupid has taken hold and is not to be gainsaid by any, er, inconvenient truths.
Bush and Bookworm … irrefutable proof of the disconnection between reading and comprehension.
“TWO OF wASHINGTON’S BEST-CONFIRMED IT SO IT MUST BE TRUE.”
Something like former Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenant confirming Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.HAH!Or should I say ah-huh?
Greg are you saying there is a difference between Book smart and Street smart ? I think you are ! Now play nice !
If comic books count ,yeah, I believe Georgie Porgie read 104 books, if not, nooooooooooo . . . way! On second thought somebody in the Whitehouse added a 1 an 0 in front of the 4,you know just doctor it up a bit. So if you cut to the chase he read 4 comic books.Which is pretty good !
I’d be curious to see your readings lists.
George W. Bush was a legacy at Yale (which still means you have to have the test scores and grades to be acceptable, it is by no means automatic), which opened the door for him, but he still had to walk through. (Pinch Sulberger was a legacy at Columbia, another Ivy League school let us remember – but Columbia managed to find a way not to let him near the place, despite the percentage of the place his family paid for. Those must have been some SAT scores!)
At Yale, he got better grades than John Kerry did, and went on for an MBA at Harvard, a school to which he had no connection and was not a legacy. (Al Gore flunked out of grad school – twice.)
George W. Bush probably learned to drive F-106s, F-16s, and A-3s from practice and manuals, not comic books. (What do you know how to fly, Swamp?) Bush is also known to take the controls of Air Force One from time to time, which I’m sure he finds enjoyable.
I don’t bother with television and newspapers much either, I completely understand his feeling. But something on the order of 100 new books a year arrive in my house, and there are currently about 7,000 taking up space. (I have to whittle it down again soon, last gave away a thousand or so in 2001; it’s time to do it again.)
Life-long athlete, baseball team owner, governor of one of the five most populous states, ultimately President.
Clearly a person of few, if any, accomplishments.
Very well summarized, JJ. Thank you! Clinton carried a book with him onto planes and brandished it the same way he waves his left hand – with a bright, shiny wedding band – when he talks. Bush doesn’t seem perturbed by the public ridiculousness; I hope that’s really true. I am convinced his long-term legacy (the one he leaves behind, not the one at Yale) will be very good.
g is proof that you don’t need a Second Life to turn your first life into a fantasy.
As you already know Book, my problem with Bush is not his class, his intellect, or with his degree of knowledge, rather my problem with Bush is that Bush is not killing enough people.