Is Bush an Idiot?

Bush Idiot

Joe Scarborbough did a segment asking the question, “Is Bush an idiot?” Crooks and Liars has the video. Listing the Bushisms makes George Bush an easy target. Joe Gandelman has his theory on how Bush wound up reading Camus (think Sea World) and argues that mocking Presidents is the American way.

More seriously, I think idiot is the wrong word. In terms of political skills, George Bush is an intelligent man. The problem is that he shows a serious lack of intellectual curiosity. He has simplistic answers for problems without bothering to investigate the full background. (I’ll give one example from a recent post at DemBloggers under the fold.) Added to this we have Bush accepting the anti-scientific flat-earth philosophy of the religious right, and therefore we have a President who is incapable of making intelligent decisions about the problems we face.

Update: Joe Scarborough follows up on his story at Huffington Post. After reviewing Bush’s faults, Scarborough sums up (remember, from a conservative viewpoint):

So does it matter in the end whether our president is articulate and intelligent?

You bet your life, it does. I’m not saying we need to elect a dork like Michael Dukakis, who famously spent vacations at the beach reading books on Swedish land use or was so overwhelmed with the details of the old SALT treaties that he would sulk off to bed depressed.

But when America is fighting a global war on terror where the battle is for hearts and minds instead of beachheads and landing strips, we need a leader who can explain to friend and foe alike why America is in Iraq, why we keep sending arms to Israel and why liberal democracy really is preferable to Islamic fascism.

Right now, George W. Bush is not that leader.

Bush Was Even Dumber Than We Realized

Posted on Fri Aug 4th, 2006 at 05:43:13 PM EST

A recent movie mocked George Bush by showing a President who was surprised to learn there were different types of people living in Iraq. It turns out it was no joke. Raw Story reports on a book by Former Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith which claims “President George W. Bush was unaware that there were two major sects of Islam just two months before the President ordered troops to invade Iraq.”

4 Comments

  1. 1
    Marcus says:

    Well I’ve seen clips of Bush in his Gubernatorial campaign days and it is true, he was a very different man bright, engaged, witty.
    Listen, out here in the alcohol/drug recovery community it has been general consensus that the guy that is a self admitted addict is what we call “active” again and has been since about the beginning of his second year in office were we all noticed his demeanor change in a way that we are all too painfully familiar with. On top of that it has leaked out that allegedly he is on psych meds of some sort. This in addition to his relapse makes for some scary implications. And so Joe’s puzzlement and even the die-hard repubs jaw dropping reactions to his ever increasing foibles and blunders. The bottom line – big daddy is drinking and using again but in this case the whole freek’n nation should go to Al Anon and stop enabling and being in denial!
    I’m being cheeky there, but really this is the real issue that a hand full of us across the country dem and repub alike see as the issue.
    And it does concern us.
    We had this problem w/ our Mayor Flynn in Boston when he first ran he was in recovery and was just wonderful then after a few years he relapsed and went to hell in a hand basket.

  2. 2
    kj says:

    Marcus, I do agree with your statement above.

  3. 3
    Marcus says:

    P.S.
    When they found Flynn in hell in that hand basket they scooped him up and sent him to the Vatican as ambassador. Really :0

  4. 4
    Editor says:

    Sad thing is so many people say “Bush went to Yale, he can’t be that stupid.” Yale with a little help from his Dad. Look what we’re up against in 2008. Mitt Romney went to Harvard and BYU – I’m not saying he’s ignorant; he actually seems pretty intelligent, BUT he still has that fundamentalist religious narrow-minded outlook on the world. If Bush was more of a secularist, I wonder if he would have been so quick to invade a Moslem country? I don’t think he respects them. And we know what the Mormons think of everyone else. They’re still waiting for Jesus to come back and reign in Missouri. Wait until the other nations, especially those in the Middle East learn about his beliefs.

    http://www.exposeromney.com/pages/InsidersPerspective.html

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