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.

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