Bush to nation: I don’t need no education

March 16, 2006

The president was in upstate New York this week for a scripted “conversation” on the administration’s prescription drug program. Early on, Bush made one of his favorite jokes.

Bush: I called upon a fellow named Dr. Mark McClellan to join me in this effort. He’s here. That’s him right there. He is a — (applause.) He’s a PhD, see — I’m a C student. (Laughter.) Look who’s the President and who’s the advisor. (Laughter and applause.) Dr. Mark is in charge of what’s called CMS. He’ll tell you what that means. We use a lot of initials in Washington. The way I like to describe it to you is he is in charge of making sure the Medicare reform plan is explained, rolled out, and administered properly. And so, Mark, thanks for coming. Welcome.

McClellan: Mr. President, it’s great to be here.

Bush: PhD in what?

McClellan: In economics, and I’m a physician, as well.

Bush: See, he spent a lot of time in the classroom. (Laughter.)

Hilarious. The president thinks it’s a laugh-riot that the egghead who reads a lot gets to be his advisor, while he can become president after barely cracking a book. Let this be a lesson to all of us.

It’s become something of a pet peeve for me, not only because the president seems to revel in his anti-intellectualism, but also because he repeats this little joke all the damn time.

A year ago this week, Bush held a similar event, this time on Social Security, at Auburn University. The same joke got big laughs.

Bush: I’ve asked Jeff Brown to join me. He is a professor. He can tell you where — where do you profess? (Laughter.)

Brown: I have a PhD in economics, and I teach at a business school.

Bush: Yes. It’s an interesting lesson here, by the way. He’s an advisor. Now, he is the PhD, and I am a C-student — or was a C-student. Now, what’s that tell you? (Laughter and applause.)

Well, for one thing it tells us that the president isn’t terribly impressed with the rigors of academia. It also suggests Bush believes the smart and educated are worth having around, but the real power belongs with people like him. And if he can poke fun at the nerd in front of thousands of people, making himself appear bigger in the process, all the better.

This joke is actually one of Bush’s go-to lines. He’s used it over and over and over again, and each time, the president’s pre-screened audience also reacts the exact same way — with laughter and applause.

Indeed, this unfortunately fits into the image the president has worked to create. He brags about not having done well in school. He has said he doesn’t read newspapers and prefers short meetings that don’t go into too much detail. When Paul O’Neill, Bush’s former Treasury Secretary, described the president as “disengaged” during their policy meetings, Bush joked, “I wasn’t disengaged. I was bored as hell and my mother told me never to interrupt.”

Before the 2000 election, Molly Ivins said, “I can’t imagine why anyone would consider him for president. He’s not smart, he doesn’t know much, and he doesn’t work hard.” Bush has been proving her right ever since.

My favorite is “If you are so smart, why am I President?”

The honest answer would be, because the Republican primary system is a popularity contest, not an intelligence test, and the 2000 election went 5 to 4 with your daddy’s friends voting for you.

  • When one considers that, left to their own devices over the years, the majorty of hairless bipeds would still be sitting in the trees, sniffing each other’s butts and snarfing bananas, were it not for the 5% that actually qualify as “homo sapiens” rather than “homo sap,” it isn’t surprising at all that Georgie gets the laughs and applause he does for putting down his betters in front of the booboisie. Want to bet in that crowd there haven’t been 50 books read in the past year, total?

    Yes, I am an elitist. My belief in democracy is that it’s the best system for finding the next generation’s 5% “creative minority” without which the species drops back into the dark ages they all so obviously love.

    God I hate that mother-frakking piece of garbage masquerading as a human being!!!!!!!

  • There’s another factor here. I’m going to give all the PhD’s who Bush made the butt of his jokes the benefit of the doubt and say that they earned their degrees and subsequent positions. By using the power of the Bush family name he has manipulated and cheated his way through life. With Bush’s lack of intellect I wonder how he even managed to get C’s in college. He cheated to win the presidency, I can’t imagine that his college career was any different.

  • I think it is more than just the he revels in his anti-intellectualism, I think he has strong feelings of inferriority. He makes jokes that mock intellectuals to dimish their importance and pump up his standing while at the same time trying to make himself feel better and appeal to that mythical “common man.”

  • Let’s not overlook the element of aggression in this constantly -repeated joke. It’s also a way to establish a power relation between The Moron and The Egghead. Guess who’s on top? That’s also at the root of all the nicknaming, a trait of this asshole’s that I particularly dislike. God, I hate this prick.

  • Somebody should snap back “yes, but my daddy wasn’t president, was he?”. That would be very satisfying but they would probably quietly disappear or be shot in the face by the VP.

  • “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

    Don’t fret, friends. The joke ultimately will be on Bush, as he goes down in history as the least effective president this country has ever had and his comprehensive imbecility and incompetence actually raises the standards we demand of our elected officials. The tragedy, of course, is with all those who have died and suffered as a direct or proximate result of his many failures.

    In a sense, we should be even more glad that Clinton left the country in sufficiently good shape that we’ll (probably…) survive eight years of this asshat and his miserable Reign of Error.

  • “Yes, but my daddy wasn’t president, was he?”

    Excellent! Another possibility: “Right, but when people see me they don’t think, ‘Incompetent.'”

  • “You see, I’m a doer. I ‘do’ things. Whereas, my advisors are all teachers. There’s an old saying in New York – at least it’s an old saying in Texas, probably here in New York too. Those who can, do. Those who do not…can’t…If you’re a teacher, you probably can’t do anything. heh.”

    It’s only a matter of time…

  • Let that be a lesson to those of us who went to grad school and find ourselves contemplating jobs at Home Depot….

  • With Bush’s lack of intellect I wonder how he even managed to get C’s in college. He cheated to win the presidency, I can’t imagine that his college career was any different.

    Many fraternities have file cabinets full of exams, quizzes and term papers for their members to “borrow” and “study” from. Bush probably made liberal use of the Delta Kappa Epsilon files. Leave it to him to screw it up so he only gets a C average.

  • Bush is the nominal head of the Bush Crime Family (though what he’ll do after his lame-duck presidency comes to an end is painful to imagine). All crime family bigwigs envy the know-how guys they depend upon for survival. Think “Godfather” – the reliance of the mob bosses on their lawyers, accountants, politicians, judges, plastic surgeons, morticians, etc.

    I may laugh at Bush and the yokels who giggle at his self-deprecation (the monkey at the carnival), but I have only contempt for those who underwent competitive professional preparation only to squander it for an opportunity to french-kiss the buttholes of scum like Bush.

    FWIW, I’m a Ph.D., professor emeritus, and proud of my record in research in and teaching, and I’m very grateful to a few of my teachers and many of my students for what I’ve received from them.

  • It’s like pouring salt in the wound, isn’t it? I wish I
    had dajafi’s confidence, but I don’t.

    As CB points out,

    “This joke is actually one of Bush’s go-to lines. He’s used it over and over and over again, and each time, the president’s pre-screened audience also reacts the exact same way — with laughter and applause.”

    The problem here is that they’ve got better than
    50% of the American people to select the pre-screened
    audience from. I shudder every time I think of the polls
    that tell us over half the people believe human beings were
    created exactly as stated (two, distinctly different ways) in
    the Bible.

    I also agree with Tom Cleaver. It is appalling that Bush
    fosters a culture of arrogant ignorance and contempt for
    the intellectually elite in this nation. Were it not for the
    top end of the IQ scale, if the IQ bell curve were shifted
    just a few points downward, there’d be no human civilization
    at all (although maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing).
    Why does our society promote such an attitude toward
    intellectual achievement and prowess?

  • There is academic intelligence and then there is street smarts.

    Bush don’t know much about science books….history, geography, economics… but what the hell.
    He’s a smart con man who disarms his marks by appearing simple but honest…. when if fact he is quite the opposite.

  • More childish bullying from his playground days. This is the unscripted Bush. Insults people right to their faces. And the nicknaming mentioned by Farinata X is just another way he exerts his power over others. The SOB denies people their own names! Of course, all this plays well with those who are themselves stupid and uneducated bullies.

  • C’mon, is really a big deal? Didn’t LBJ make the same jokes about all his harvard-educated advisors versus his teaching college background? Aren’t there better things we could be obsessing over?

  • Part of me sees this and says it’s a dodge: he is confronting his weakness (that he’s a product of rich elitist nepotism) and re-characterizing it in a playful way– the joke keeps people from thinking too deeply about the fact that he was only a mediocre student + didn’t accomplish much– otherwise, thinking about it might lead them to the conclusion that, well, he’s a product of rich-elitist-nepotism. He’s already given them the soundbite-alternative to that train of thought. And the people in attendance will repeat the joke to their friends and neighbors when they get home.

    But, it could just be that he ad-libbed the joke once and it worked, so they repeat it.

    At any rate, Bushes and Walkers have been attending Yale and have been bankers and oilmen for a century, so his becoming the president is just not at all the magic trick he makes it out to be when he points out that he was a C student.

  • “but also because he repeats this little joke all the damn time.” (emphasis added)

    You can tell this REALLY bothers CB. When how often do you see him use a word like this in TCR?

  • Without eggheads — or even functional illiterates — Bush couldn’t find his ass with both hands.

    It’s becoming a hardship to both despise and fear the f**kwit a little more each day.

    (Sorry about the language, but I’m giving out of mannerly words. On one hand, though, I try to emulate our whoretime president by making at least one typo in every post here.)

  • Same old arrogance… “I don’t believe in polls”
    .. but this one might catch his eye.

    On Raw story- A new poll finds that a slim majority of Americans favor plans to censure President George W. Bush…, while a surprising 42% favor moves to actually impeach the President.

  • Speaking of references to Pink Floyd’s Another Brick In the Wall, CB, is it just me, or does anyone else see a similarity in Bush’s behavior to Pink from “The Wall” ? Gradually building a wall around himself, finding enemies everywhere, shaving off all his hair (OK, maybe not that last one).

    “Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter when the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?”

  • Nick: by itself, probably just annoying. However, when considered with the Bushites a) repeatedly ignoring/editing out scientific evidence in their policies, b) actually try to equate “intelligent design” with science, and c) keeping a lid on the NIH budget that feeds academic science research, it seems more than just distasteful.

    You are right, there are more important things, but that does not mean this should not fuel my contempt for that douchebag.

  • Surprising that the President should suffer from

    Small Man’s Disease

    But, hey, I’m not going to argue with him about it. He’s always right.

  • Here’s some food for thought that I lifted from David Neiwert’s blog. The following is by Umberto Eco:

    Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering’s fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play (“When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” and “universities are nests of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

    Maybe this topic goes a little deeper than I originally thought.

  • EVERYthing this jackass does, from dissing those w/any intellect to wearing the damn presidential seal sewn onto his clothes, it’s all done to embiggen him. moron.

  • (With apologies to Mike)

    Bush dreams of Paris Hilton as a replacement for Dick Cheney.

  • If he’s still bragging about being a C student now, I can see why he was a C student then.

  • when i was in college i got mostly good grades but slacked on some–dint study enough 🙁 so i got a couple of Cs. i was disheartend to realize that if you don’t know a subject well enough to get an A or B, you don’t know that subject. after those courses were over i knew essentially nothing about those subjects.
    i was most dismayed to learn that that year the standards had been raised so that future teachers must maintain a minimum C average. 🙁

  • Why does our society promote such an attitude toward intellectual achievement and prowess?

    Because politics is a game of odds. In order to win elections, you need to carry the largest number of voters possible. That means pandering to the clear majorities and ignoring the niche groups when it’s campaign time.

    Thus, political messages are structured to appeal to that fat hump in the dead center of the IQ bell curve — the average folk. Every platform is now a sales pitch. It’s no secret that, nowadays, if you can’t find a way to sell your agenda to the public, it’s dead in the water.

    What about the minorities on the narrow ends of the bell curve, you ask?

    The stupid ones at the bottom will not realize the message isn’t being directed at them. Only the smart ones know that they are being ignored, ridiculed, and held in contempt by the politicians. And that leaves the smart ones up the proverbial creek without the proverbial paddle.

    • Comments are closed.