[Rhodes22-list] Political humor

[Brad Haslett]

Robert,

Here's another opinion on that.  BTW, I don't think my education at U of
Arkansas-Little Rock and Embry-Riddle is on the same par with Yale and
Harvard but at least I had a better ACT and SAT scores than both Kerry and
Gore.

Brad

-------from the WSJ


*JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL*
*Bush's Brain*
The president just doesn't communicate anymore.

*Monday, August 21, 2006 12:01 a.m.*

When a U.S. president has a 40% approval rating, critics declare open
season. Last week Britain's Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott had to deny
a report that he had called the Bush administration "crap" in a private
meeting with fellow Labour Party members of parliament. But Harry Cohen, a
Labour MP, stood by his account and went on to claim Mr. Prescott had also
called Mr. Bush "just a cowboy with his Stetson on."

Foreigners' deriding Mr. Bush isn't big news, but doubts about the president
may be spreading to his domestic media allies. A National Review editorial
this month concluded the president has a problem connecting with the
American people on Iraq: "It is time for the Bush administration to
acknowledge that its approach of assuring people that progress is being made
and operating on that optimistic basis in Iraq isn't working."

Joe Scarborough, a conservative MSBNC talk-show host and former GOP
congressman from Florida, is even questioning the president's mental skills.
Last week he devoted a segment on his program (a segment on which I was a
guest) to the question: "Is our president an idiot? . . . Is George Bush
playing dumb or is he just plain dumb?" The next day he wrote on
HuffingtonPost.com that while Republican presidents are routinely an unfair
"target of ridicule from liberal circles" he has noticed that now
"Republicans are quietly joining the left in questioning the President's
intellectual prowess." He says that "former administration officials still
close to the White House will tell you Mr. Bush detests dissent, embraces a
narrow world view and is intellectually incurious."

For years knocks on Mr. Bush's intelligence have served as a substitute for
arguing against the substance of his ideas. Indeed, the modern media age is
replete with examples of prominent Republicans who have been ridiculed for
being dim. Eisenhower was mocked for spending more time on golf courses than
in briefing rooms, and Reagan was deemed "an amiable dunce" by Democratic
wise man Clark Clifford. Today historians have revised the popular opinion
of both men. Ike is seen as a crafty strategist who enjoyed being
underestimated by his critics. As for Reagan, even former New York Times
editor Howell Raines has admitted that "Clifford got indicted for bank fraud
and the dunce ended the Cold War and the entire Soviet era."

 For some reason, Democrats never get tagged with the "stupid" label. When
I've asked journalists and political scientists if any leading liberal has
developed a general media image as intellectually limited in recent years,
they always draw a blank. Clearly, a certain amount of bias is at work,
since stupidity knows no ideology.

Consider the treatment that the past two Democratic nominees received. Mr.
Bush has been routinely pilloried for having been less than academically
inclined while attending Yale and Harvard Business School. But when the
Washington Post revealed Al Gore's unimpressive academic record, which
included sophomore grades at Harvard that were "lower than any semester
recorded on Bush's transcript from Yale," the media yawned.

They had a similar reaction to the news that Mr. Bush's SAT scores were
higher than both those of John Kerry. Linda Gottfredson, a co-director of
the University of Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of
Intelligence and Society, told United Press International columnist Steve
Sailer in 2004 that when she converted Mr. Bush's SAT score to an IQ, "I
derived an IQ of 125, which is the 95th percentile." A study in the latest
issue of the academic journal Political Psychology concludes that "Bush is
definitely intelligent . . . in the upper range of college graduates in raw
intellect."

Everyone has long known the president is no Pericles. One of Mr. Bush's
friends cheerfully admitted to me once that "every morning George gets up
and arm-wrestles the English language all day. He often loses." Many bright
people are inarticulate. Albert Einstein was dyslexic, and his lectures in
both English and German were said to be full of malapropisms and gaffes.
Christopher "Mad Dog" Russo, a host at sports radio station WFAN in New
York, is famous for his synaptic misfirings, but his depth of sports
knowledge is encyclopedic and he holds an audience with style and panache.

Indeed, Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate.com, who has compiled the
definitive collection of verbal presidential flubs he calls "Bushisms," says
Mr. Bush's verbal difficulties appear to represent "some kind of linguistic
deficit akin to dyslexia that does not indicate a lack of mental capacity
per se. Bush also compensates with his nonverbal acumen." Voltaire long ago
observed that common sense is both more rare and more desirable in leaders
than mere intelligence.

That said, Mr. Bush's failure to articulate his policies is helping to drive
down his approval ratings and to fuel suspicions that he is intellectually
insular. Most damning is Mr. Scarborough's observation that Mr. Bush's
battles with the English language are getting "worse with age." When he
reviewed tapes of Mr. Bush as Texas governor, Mr. Scarborough says, he saw
"a funny, self-assured public figure who inspires confidence. But these
days, the mere opening of Mr. Bush's mouth makes many GOP loyalists shake in
their tasseled loafers."

Some observers date the growing hesitancy and lack of clarity in Mr. Bush's
public presentations to the deteriorating situation in Iraq and Hurricane
Katrina. "Everything he does now, he is allowed no margin of error on these
kinds of gaffes," says Lawrence O'Donnell, a former Democratic congressional
staffer. "If Iraq was a real policy success, that guy could fall down
everywhere he went and he would be getting standing ovations."

And that is the fundamental issue in the debate over Bush's Brain. Iraq is
not going well, and when the going is tough, a president needs to be able to
make a clear, vigorous defense of his policies. That clearly isn't happening
right now, and the doubts about the president are starting to grow and
threaten to further limit his effectiveness.

 Mr. Bush is a stubborn man, one who almost relishes the contempt in which
policy elites hold him. But he has shown a willingness to open himself up to
new ideas and people when things get bad enough. Earlier this year he
stabilized management of his dysfunctional White House by bringing in Josh
Bolten as a more hands-on chief of staff. He then increased the firepower of
the White House press office by hiring the savvy Tony Snow.

Things are a little better now, but only a little. The president's recent
news conferences and speeches have been shaky enough that the doubts are
clearly not receding. Some rethinking of how Mr. Bush has let public
confidence in his foreign policy slip away is in order.

The world is watching. Even though he paid a price for it, Sen. Joe
Lieberman was right when he wrote last November in The Wall Street Journal
that "it's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he
will be the commander in chief for three more critical years. And that in
matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's
peril."

At the same time, Republicans should remember what Mr. Lieberman wrote
immediately afterwards: "It is time for Republicans in the White House and
Congress who distrust Democrats to acknowledge that greater Democratic
involvement and support in the war in Iraq is critical to rebuilding the
support of the American people that is essential to our success in that
war."

Mr. Bush may not be an articulate president, but he has to find a better way
to reach out to all Americans--but especially Democrats and independents of
good will--to ensure the nation doesn't suffer another foreign-policy
disaster à la Vietnam.



On 8/21/06, Robert Skinner <robert at squirrelhaven.com> wrote:
>
> Rummy, it looks as if Google has company...
>
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/19/AR2006081900568.html?referrer=emailarticle
>
> /Robert Skinner
> --------------------------------------------------
> R22RumRunner at aol.com wrote:
> >
> > Subject: was  this a mistake on google's part?
> >
> > 1- Go to _www.google.com_ (http://www.google.com/)
> >
> > 2- Type in "failure"  in the search text box
> >
> > 3- Laugh at what comes up as the first  listing
> __________________________________________________
> Use Rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org, Help? www.rhodes22.org/list
>