Yes, I know. Saying this is like picking on the stupid kid. But that's the whole point. Cenk Uygur writes:
If someone is this ignorant, they're usually embarrassed and try not to talk much. But this guy is so dumb he has no idea how dumb he is. This sounds like a conversation you might have with a child, a mentally challenged child. Johnny, do you know how big Russia is? How about China?This would all be unfortunate if George was your dentist, or worse yet, your accountant. But he is the leader of the free world. This man makes life or death decisions every day. If you say you're not scared about that, you're lying.
Would you let him do the books for your business? Would you trust your company in his hands for eight years? (No matter how Republican you are, you know you just said no to that question.) Would you trust him to be your kids' guidance counselor and take his advice seriously? If your kids were in the Army and he was their field commander, would you feel good about putting their lives in his hands?
Come on, no one is crazy enough to say yes to that. Yet, he has all of our lives in his hands. The emperor has no clothes. The emperor has no clothes. It's about time someone in the mainstream media said it.
I agree that it's important to point out that Bush is incredibly stupid. Dangerously stupid. Murderously stupid. When he is indistinguishable from satire, you know you have a problem.
But I don't think this will be enough. I think this strategy could actually backfire because Democrats aren't running against George Bush (thankfully, he can't be president again). While I think modern conservatism is an idiotic philosophy, many of the leading conservatives are not stupid in the sense that Bush is ("Russia's a big country and you're a big country.") Running on the "Bush is a fucking moron" platform could unintentionally open the door for the "competent conservative." In other words, Republicans could argue the problem was Bush, not his 'philosophy' of Preznitin'.
The problem lies not with individual conservatives, but with modern conservatism. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kristol, Perle, Bolton, and the rest of the Looney Tunes are not outliers: they are the conservative movement. The stupidity of the High Defender of the Blessed Blastocyst just compounds the problem.
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"Some people" dispute that W is stupid because he made better grades than John Kerry (whom I think is very smart). I think this says more about the failure of grading at Yale than anything about Bush's intelligence.
But then there's the "eight intelligences" theory--perhaps W is just bad at the language arts? He really sucks as a speaker--casually or formally. I think his true gift must be his aggressive nature, and his ability to hide his more ugly personality traits behind the good-old-boy jokes.
According to Molly Ivins, Bush is not stupid. It may be that he is merely uncurious: there seem to be many things he just does not care to know about. As far as the "do you want this guy running the only surviving superpower" question goes, though, it's a difference that doesn't make a difference as far as I can see.
Here is a thought we have been batting around a bit lately: "not so bright" candidates who have some kind of appeal in a certain kind of folksy way have worked out rather well for the Republicans (viewing the R's as a proxy for Conservatives). I'm thinking of Reagan as well. Arguably Reagan and Bush II are the presidents who were most successful in ushering in this new Conservative agenda. Smart guys like Nixon didn't work out so well. (Admittedly this is a generalization from not a whole lot of examples. But there was even a small amount of this in the first Bush administration.)
In the case of both Bush II and Reagan, any comments on their lack of grasp of the facts have been taken as unfair personal attacks. All discussion of their disastrous policies seemed to get derailed by this.
Could this be a deliberate policy of the R's to capitalize on a certain strain of anti-intellectualism in the American electorate? I realize that I'm probably saying something that others have said, and better; but it also seems to me that what is behind a lot of the blue-state hositlity to certain of the D's candidates is that they seem to be "smart," and "smart" doesn't play well.
This line of thought is depressing me, so I'll stop here.
I meant, of course, red-state hostility to certain of the D's candidates.
More caffeine needed. . .
reagan is einstein compared to bush.