Thursday, May 13, 2004

How Bush Chose Stupidity



This post is supposed to suffice while I work on something much longer and more boring to harass you with. But it's interesting, full of deep educational and psychological dilemmas:

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.


Read the whole thing here.

We might disagree about the good looks, of course. But I am concerned that he couldn't tell Medicare from Medicaid (the first funds certain types of health care for people 65 and over, the latter funds nursing care for the elderly poor and health care in general for poor families), especially as one is a federal government program and the other is based on states. I suspect he carries books to work on his arm muscles. I prefer to put them on top of my head for posture improvement purposes.