bush is an idiot. there, we should all be able to at least agree on this one obvious point, with much evidence to support it.

John Kerry is also an idiot.

However, you know you're not going to get very far if your argument is "he's an idiot." Especially if one applies the actual definition of the word idiot.

whether kerry's an idiot or not is debatable. but bush's idiocy is a fact, like gravity.

bush cannot be both an idiot and a diabolical super-genious hell-bent on taking over the world.

<standard liberal response>
No, that's his cabinet. Bush is just a figurehead moron, the cabinet is the evil war mongers

</liberal diatribe>

Originally posted by Nimrod
<standard liberal response>
No, that's his cabinet. Bush is just a figurehead moron, the cabinet is the evil war mongers

</liberal diatribe>

That's true, though. His cabinet runs the war, the economy, etc. He's responsible for their actions, though.

Bush cannot be better than Kerry. No fuckin way.

Originally posted by Debaser
Bush cannot be better than Kerry. No fuckin way. Easily. The Democrats screwed the pooch when they selected Kerry.

define idiot?

Originally posted by tootsie
define idiot?

people who need "idiot" defined.

Originally posted by if you are


people who need "idiot" defined.

Considering some of your other political posts, it is wise to ask you what you mean by what you say.

umm, what the fuck are you talking about? people who don't know what the word "idiot" means are idiots. like you.

Originally posted by if you are
umm, what the fuck are you talking about? people who don't know what the word "idiot" means are idiots.

Alright. Words are never manipulated or twisted or changed and their meanings remain constant and are never are skewed for political use. you got me. I'm so wrong. Please forgive me.

Originally posted by jczeroman
bush cannot be both an idiot and a diabolical super-genious hell-bent on taking over the world.

This one sentence cripples the Anybody But Bush argument.

Originally posted by Ghetto_Squirrel


This one sentence cripples the Anybody But Bush argument.

Not really.

Originally posted by Debaser
Not really.

If you understand that Bush isn't the problem and that he's just a puppet for a much larger set of serious issues, then getting rid of Bush the personality doesn't accomplish very much.

Originally posted by Ghetto_Squirrel


If you understand that Bush isn't the problem and that he's just a puppet for a much larger set of serious issues, then getting rid of Bush the personality doesn't accomplish very much.

you get rid of bush = you get rid of his VP cheney and cabinet i.e. wolfowitz, rummy, etc.

for the love of fuck, man. when people say "anybody but bush" or "bush is ruining this country" theyre referring to his administration and cabinet as a whole, with bush himself being a part of that (big part/no part, whatever). its not exclusively a shorthand way of referring to his adminstration and their policies/actions, but relative to whatever context its in it either means the man or the bush administration. in those examples it refers to the later. im so sick of hearing, "well how is he a ignorant puppet yet blamed personally for everything?" total semantics. bush the person, on a practical level, is an idiot. which is to say he is person of "subnormal intelligence". we dont have to fucking elaborate on this do we? he just personally isnt a bright guy. so what though, that means little. he isnt indicative of the intelligence of most of the republican part and especially not the very intelligent people he is surrounded by

Originally posted by jczeroman


Alright. Words are never manipulated or twisted or changed and their meanings remain constant and are never are skewed for political use. you got me. I'm so wrong. Please forgive me.

fuck you man.. when i say "idiot" i mean exactly what you think i mean. we all know what it means and we've known for basically our whole lives.. so just shut up if you don't have a decent argument and have to stoop down to semantics that don't even exist!

i dont think i asked an unfair question.

im not sure what you meant.

hes an idiot in that he has poor grammar and speaking abilities?

hes an idiot as in he has a low iq and is secretly hiding it from us?

its a broad statement and i wanted clarification.

Originally posted by Ghetto_Squirrel


If you understand that Bush isn't the problem and that he's just a puppet for a much larger set of serious issues, then getting rid of Bush the personality doesn't accomplish very much.


exactly.

I think we're asking for more problems than are necessary by voting Kerry into office this year.
BUT, with the trend of things going the way it is, I see the next four years being very bleak for no matter who wins this election. The republicans seem to also have their fiscal issues in check when it comes to the problems the country is facing right now. The republicans also control most of the country's money and for that they will most likely see to it that the ridiculous debt is payed off as quickly as possible, because it's coming out of their pockets, and if there's one thing republicans don't like, that's money coming out of their pockets for no reason.
The conservatives as well as the liberals aren't too happy with Bush and his advisors behavior these past 4 years, it was a lose lose situation for everyone. Bush just made a lot of very drastic decisions in light of a very good window of opportunity and got himself into a larger hole than he anticipated, making the US look like a very...desperate country to the rest of the world.
Bush got us in this hole...I'd hate to see a democrat win the election, raise taxes, get us into more problems and waste MORE of my tax money on MORE nonsensical things, to try and get us out of this hole.
More than anything we're in a fiscal hole and not a social hole, it's up to the people who control the money to fix that....and when individual rights and liberties begin to be quesioned, that's when a democrat should step in.
That's actually what I'm more concerned about than anything, having bush appoint a supreme court judge that is more conservative than the pope, i'll be damned if they make more laws that have nothing to do with anything.


yadda, im bantering.

btw: I'm voting for Bush.

Originally posted by Debaser
you get rid of bush = you get rid of his VP cheney and cabinet i.e. wolfowitz, rummy, etc.

That's a given, but I still don't think that there are just five people sitting in a clandestine location altering the course of the entire country toward world domination.

Originally posted by Ihaman
btw: I'm voting for Bush.

:noway: :rolleyes:

Originally posted by Ghetto_Squirrel


That's a given, but I still don't think that there are just five people sitting in a clandestine location altering the course of the entire country toward world domination.

uh. then who is running this country?

It's not Bush, it's not Rumsfeld, it's not Wolfowitz. They're terrible neocons who are perhaps the most aggressive people we've seen in office as far as actually implementing their goals. In the end, though, they're just a product of the environment we've been in for a while. Our government has been a (occasionally voluntary) slave to financial and corporate interests that have been at work for decades, and those transcend party lines and specific administrations.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2100064/


bushisms
The Misunderestimated Man
How Bush chose stupidity.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Friday, May 7, 2004, at 6:54 AM PT



Adapted from the introduction to The Deluxe Election-Edition Bushisms, published by Fireside Books/Simon & Schuster. Reprinted with permission; © 2004 Jacob Weisberg.

The question I am most frequently asked about Bushisms is, "Do you really think the president of the United States is dumb?"

The short answer is yes.

The long answer is yes and no.

Quotations collected over the years in Slate may leave the impression that George W. Bush is a dimwit. Let's face it: A man who cannot talk about education without making a humiliating grammatical mistake ("The illiteracy level of our children are appalling"); who cannot keep straight the three branches of government ("It's the executive branch's job to interpret law"); who coins ridiculous words ("Hispanos," "arbolist," "subliminable," "resignate," "transformationed"); who habitually says the opposite of what he intends ("the death tax is good for people from all walks of life!") sounds like a grade-A imbecile.

And if you don't care to pursue the matter any further, that view will suffice. George W. Bush has governed, for the most part, the way any airhead might, undermining the fiscal condition of the nation, squandering the goodwill of the world after Sept. 11, and allowing huge problems (global warming, entitlement spending, AIDS) to metastasize toward catastrophe through a combination of ideology, incomprehension, and indifference. If Bush isn't exactly the moron he sounds, his synaptic misfirings offer a plausible proxy for the idiocy of his presidency.

In reality, however, there's more to it. Bush's assorted malapropisms, solecisms, gaffes, spoonerisms, and truisms tend to imply that his lack of fluency in English is tantamount to an absence of intelligence. But as we all know, the inarticulate can be shrewd, the fluent fatuous. In Bush's case, the symptoms point to a specific malady—some kind of linguistic deficit akin to dyslexia—that does not indicate a lack of mental capacity per se.

Bush also compensates with his non-verbal acumen. As he notes, "Smart comes in all kinds of different ways." The president's way is an aptitude for connecting to people through banter and physicality. He has a powerful memory for names, details, and figures that truly matter to him, such as batting averages from the 1950s. Bush also has a keen political sense, sharpened under the tutelage of Karl Rove.

What's more, calling the president a cretin absolves him of responsibility. Like Reagan, Bush avoids blame for all manner of contradictions, implausible assertions, and outright lies by appearing an amiable dunce. If he knows not what he does, blame goes to the three puppeteers, Cheney, Rove, and Rumsfeld. It also breeds sympathy. We wouldn't laugh at FDR because he couldn't walk. Is it less cruel to laugh at GWB because he can't talk? The soft bigotry of low expectations means Bush is seen to outperform by merely getting by. Finally, elitist condescension, however merited, helps cement Bush's bond to the masses.

But if "numskull" is an imprecise description of the president, it is not altogether inaccurate. 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. Consider the testimony of several who know him well.

Richard Perle, foreign policy adviser: "The first time I met Bush 43 … two things became clear. One, he didn't know very much. The other was that he had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much."

David Frum, former speechwriter: "Bush had a poor memory for facts and figures. … Fire a question at him about the specifics of his administration's policies, and he often appeared uncertain. Nobody would ever enroll him in a quiz show."

Laura Bush, spouse: "George is not an overly introspective person. He has good instincts, and he goes with them. He doesn't need to evaluate and reevaluate a decision. He doesn't try to overthink. He likes action."

Paul O'Neill, former treasury secretary: "The only way I can describe it is that, well, the President is like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection."

A second, more damning aspect of Bush's mind-set is that he doesn't want to know anything in detail, however important. Since college, he has spilled with contempt for knowledge, equating learning with snobbery and making a joke of his own anti-intellectualism. ("[William F. Buckley] wrote a book at Yale; I read one," he quipped at a black-tie event.) By O'Neill's account, Bush could sit through an hourlong presentation about the state of the economy without asking a single question. ("I was bored as hell," the president shot back, ostensibly in jest.)

Closely related to this aggressive ignorance is a third feature of Bush's mentality: laziness. Again, this is a lifelong trait. Bush's college grades were mostly Cs (including a 73 in Introduction to the American Political System). At the start of one term, the star of the Yale football team spotted him in the back row during the shopping period for courses. "Hey! George Bush is in this class!" Calvin Hill shouted to his teammates. "This is the one for us!" As governor of Texas, Bush would take a long break in the middle of his short workday for a run followed by a stretch of video golf or computer solitaire.

A fourth and final quality of Bush's mind is that it does not think. The president can't tolerate debate about issues. Offered an option, he makes up his mind quickly and never reconsiders. At an elementary school, a child once asked him whether it was hard to make decisions as president. "Most of the decisions come pretty easily for me, to be frank with you." By leaping to conclusions based on what he "believes," Bush avoids contemplating even the most obvious basic contradictions: between his policy of tax cuts and reducing the deficit; between his call for a humble foreign policy based on alliances and his unilateral assertion of American power; between his support for in-vitro fertilization (which destroys embryos) and his opposition to fetal stem-cell research (because it destroys embryos).

Why would someone capable of being smart choose to be stupid? To understand, you have to look at W.'s relationship with father. This filial bond involves more tension than meets the eye. Dad was away for much of his oldest son's childhood. Little George grew up closer to his acid-tongued mother and acted out against the absent parent—through adolescent misbehavior, academic failure, dissipation, and basically not accomplishing anything at all until well into his 40s.

Dubya's youthful screw-ups and smart-aleck attitude reflect some combination of protest, plea for attention, and flailing attempt to compete. Until a decade ago, his résumé read like a send-up of his dad's. Bush senior was a star student at Andover and Phi Beta Kappa at Yale, where he was also captain of the baseball team; Junior struggled through with gentleman's C's and, though he loved baseball, couldn't make the college lineup. Père was a bomber pilot in the Pacific; fils sat out 'Nam in the Texas Air National Guard, where he lost flying privileges by not showing up. Dad drove to Texas in 1947 to get rich in the oil business and actually did; Son tried the same in 1975 and drilled dry holes for a decade. Bush the elder got elected to Congress in 1966; Shrub ran in 1978, didn't know what he was talking about, and got clobbered.

Through all this incompetent emulation runs an undercurrent of hostility. In an oft-told anecdote circa 1973, GWB—after getting wasted at a party and driving over a neighbor's trash can in Houston—challenged his dad. "I hear you're lookin' for me," W. told the chairman of the Republican National Committee. "You want to go mano a mano right here?" Some years later at a state dinner, he told the Queen of England he was being seated far away because he was the black sheep of the family.

After half a lifetime of this kind of frustration, Bush decided to straighten up. Nursing a hangover at a 40th-birthday weekend, he gave up Wild Turkey, cold turkey. With the help of Billy Graham, he put himself in the hands of a higher power and began going to church. He became obsessed with punctuality and developed a rigid routine. Thus did Prince Hal molt into an evangelical King Henry. And it worked! Putting together a deal to buy the Texas Rangers, the ne'er-do-well finally tasted success. With success, he grew closer to his father, taking on the role of family avenger. This culminated in his 1994 challenge to Texas Gov. Ann Richards, who had twitted dad at the 1988 Democratic convention*.

Curiously, this late arrival at adulthood did not involve Bush becoming in any way thoughtful. Having chosen stupidity as rebellion, he stuck with it out of conformity. The promise-keeper, reformed-alkie path he chose not only drastically curtailed personal choices he no longer wanted, it also supplied an all-encompassing order, offered guidance on policy, and prevented the need for much actual information. Bush's old answer to hard questions was, "I don't know and, who cares." His new answer was, "Wait a second while I check with Jesus."

A remaining bit of poignancy was his unresolved struggle with his father. "All I ask," he implored a reporter while running for governor in 1994, "is that for once you guys stop seeing me as the son of George Bush." In his campaigns, W. has kept his dad offstage. (In an exceptional appearance on the eve of the 2000 New Hampshire primary, 41 came onstage and called his son "this boy.") While some describe the second Bush presidency as a restoration, it is in at least equal measure a repudiation. The son's harder-edged conservatism explicitly rejects the old man's approach to such issues as abortion, taxes, and relations with Israel.

This Oedipally induced ignorance expresses itself most dangerously in Bush's handling of the war in Iraq. Dubya polished off his old man's greatest enemy, Saddam, but only by lampooning 41's accomplishment of coalition-building in the first Gulf War. Bush led the country to war on false pretenses and neglected to plan the occupation that would inevitably follow. A more knowledgeable and engaged president might have questioned the quality of the evidence about Iraq's supposed weapons programs. One who preferred to be intelligent might have asked about the possibility of an unfriendly reception. Instead, Bush rolled the dice. His budget-busting tax cuts exemplify a similar phenomenon, driven by an alternate set of ideologues.

As the president says, we misunderestimate him. He was not born stupid. He chose stupidity. Bush may look like a well-meaning dolt. On consideration, he's something far more dangerous: a dedicated fool.

Correction, May 7, 2004: This article originally misstated the date of the Democratic convention where Ann Richards twitted President George H.W. Bush. It was 1988 not 1992. Return to the corrected sentence.


Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2100064/