I guess the lesson is, ‘Don’t stay in school’

June 24, 2005

Bush visited the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant this week to deliver a speech on — you guessed it — nuclear power. And while the president says odd things fairly frequently, there was one exchange that seemed particularly interesting.

Bush: I appreciate the Secretary of Energy joining me today. He’s a good man, he knows a lot about the subject, you’ll be pleased to hear. I was teasing him — he taught at MIT, and — do you have a PhD?

Energy Secretary Samual Bodman: Yes.

Bush: Yes, a PhD. Now I want you to pay careful attention to this — he’s the PhD, and I’m the C student, but notice who is the advisor and who is the President.

This sums up so much about Bush’s worldview, doesn’t it? I realize that the president was probably just going for a cheap laugh at Bodman’s expense, but I think the comment was telling.

Intellectuals, as far as Bush is concerned, can only go so far. If they’re lucky, they can work really hard, learn a great deal, and … advise someone who doesn’t care much for “book learnin’.”

What a great lesson for young people everywhere: slack off, don’t study too hard, and do just enough to get by. One day, the brainiac who makes you feel inadequate will be working for you — so long as you come from a wealthy and influential family, and your dad’s friends will get you out of every possible jam.

We left off one important thing here. Be born into a multi-billionaire crime family

  • Makes me wonder if Bush has the following bumper sticker on his truck down at the ranch in crawford: My kid beat up your honor student.

    (everytime I see those bumper stickers I get angry…I can’t believe people advertise that their kid is/would be a bully)

  • Bush is more than likely also the C
    student that paid some other student
    to do his work for him. Which would
    explain his stupidity.

  • Arghghghghgh!

    Gawd.how.I.loathe.him.

    I usually don’t have a sense of blame or outrage at the retarded for being retarded– but when it comes to Bush I can’t help myself.

  • If only everyone was born into a multi-millionare family that made their money war profiteering of off WWII! Then nobody would need to go to school at all, ever again!

    Clearly there is nothing more important to Bush than money and power, he rubs it in people’s faces that he neither earned it or deserved either one!

    How anyone finds him “charming” is totally beyond my comprehension.

  • This appears to be a standard line that the Preznit uses in his “public” appearances. I remember (sorry, no cite) him doing the same thing to one of the Treasury department experts at a Social Security Bamboozapalooza events.

  • Bernie Mac did a movie called “Mr. 3000”. Mac plays a Barry Bonds type polarizing baseball figure. To give a sense of realism, actual baseball commentators appear in cameos.

    At one point in the movie several commentators are discussing why the ‘Media’ dislikes Mac’s character. Most give complicated answers then Peter Gammons, in typical Gammons fashion, cuts to the chase. He says simply, “the guy is a jerk”.

    For some reason, that seems appropriate here. We don’t need to discuss deep anxieties or resentments. No need to ponder if the prez-nunt acts out to compensate for being dyslexic and slow, pouting in his father’s shadow… The guy is just a jerk. A grade A a-hole, pure-and-simple.

    -jjf

  • I have always found it amazing that, in government service in this country, you must hide the fact that you have a Ph.D. It was tolerable in Henry Kissinger’s case because he had an accent and was weird anyway. Okay, too, for George Schultz or Pat Moynihan because they could be charming and slough it off. But having one usually seems to be a bigger embarassment in government service than, say, any number/variety of “youthful indiscretions” or conflicts of interest.

    Full disclosure: I got mine at the University of Oregon in 1970.

    One of my oldest friends and colleagues is a university professor in Germany, his native land. He has told me that if you listed the top 1,000 or so people in the German government, elected and non-elected, well over half of them would have, and be known to identify themselves with, the doctorate in their field. Largely the same pattern in journalism(!).

    I think it says a lot about our country that its intellectual lights must be hidden under a bushel, or ridiculed like the stock Bolognese professor in commedia dell’ arteK/i>.

    Ferdinand and Isabella were, on their own, monarchs of quite different realms. In Castile Isabella ruled as proudly as any Divine Right monarch. In Aragón the traditional coronation ceremony required Ferdinand to kneel before a peasant who held the crown aloft while reciting something to the effect that “We, who are as good as you, crown you, who are no better than we….” George W. Bush seems to combine the worst aspects of each. Stupid, haughty bastard.

  • Having a Ph.D. myself, I have the conceit (read: delusion) that those with doctorates value the scientific method and having a reputation for integrity. Which usually makes us bad choices for the kind of slimy things one has to do with getting ahead in politics. It also explains why Ph.D.s get so little money and nobody listens to us. It’d be a lot easier and more rewarding if we just told everyone what they wanted to hear. (Alice to Pointy-Haired Boss: JUST TELL ME WHICH LIE TO USE!!)

    Certainly, Condi isn’t doing too badly for herself.

  • shoot!
    I can’t remember where I just saw this, but a blogger had a recent post showing 3 other instances where Bush had used this same, er, joke, on 3 different people.

    The man’s got a serious inferiority complex.

    Of course, he did earn it.

  • Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s Magazine, said in
    an interview that “[Bush] makes a virtue of his
    ignorance,” and by so doing, makes a virtue of ignorance in general, I would say. It was bad
    enough before Bush. Now no one pays attention
    to those “liberal elitists” anymore. So who
    cares what scientists say about global warming
    or evolution or anything else? What do they
    know?

    What a dangerous, dangerous time this is. What
    is it going to take to wake the people up? How
    many scandals will it take before the teflon
    coating of this president is finally breached?

  • Hark…that slippery substance that coats Bush isnt Teflon, it’s slime. Thick, putrid slime. How I loathe this man.

  • I would like to use this as a springboard for discussing why going forward with nukes is a bad idea, but for more than the usual reasons. Check out my post elsewhere if you are interested.

    As in any walk of life, having a PhD is no guarantee of brilliance or belief in the scientific method. An ex-girlfriend got one for extolling the virtues of Deepak Chopra and somatics. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing particularly against either topic, but I didn’t see the scholarly basis for the work as especially strong.

    However, the same can be said of Yale, Princeton, and Harvard degrees, and the current administration provides us ample evidence of that right up at the top.

  • I’m sorry, but I was raised to believe that making light of education was the height of ignorance, not achievement. I was raised to believe that those who, for example, got a PhD were better than those who flunked out or received a pass because of family connections. I am hopeful that America strives for more than mediocrity, but I am not sure. I still believe that I was raised correctly, that I am right, and NASCAR nation is wrong and ignorant and so is our president.

  • I was raised during that era when we still stressed equality in this country, I guess that has become a quaint concept. The point wasn’t necessarily the amount of education that you had, but what you strived to do with the intelligence that you had. Aspiring to reach the lowest common denominator was something to be frowned on, and bragging about it…well what can I say.

    The only thing that separates Bush from the guests on the Jerry Springer television show is his family name.

  • I remember how surprised I was when I found out that Jimmy Carter had a PhD in nuclear physics. That was yet another case of a politician hiding his light under a bushel basket. There are a few others hidden here and there in Congress, including Rush Holt. But soulless hacks like Frist give the lie to the idea that a PhD necessarily makes for a better leader.

    What has happened in this country, that so many Americans seem to be sliding into an incredible intellectual regression in favor of religious primitivism? I’ve seen it in my own family, with my parents rejecting the respect for science and rationalism (when I was young) to an acceptance of anti-science BS including creationism today, even going so far as to deny that they ever even believed in evolution. I have pondered this for years and yet I still can’t understand how lightly attached people are to logic and rationality and how quickly they abandon them for religious hucksterism, which has today become far more damaging as it has morphed into a religiopolitics that is alienating the rest of the world.

    And Dubya is the poster boy for this regression, which helps to explain the loathing that so many (yours truly definitely included!) feel for the man, who parades his ignorance like a badge of honor. Not only an embarrassment for Americans throughout the world, he’s an embarrassment for the human race. And yet millions of his fellow ignorami adore the man. No wonder Rove revels in Machiavelli. The unprincipled bastard knows only too well that the sheeple are still abundant enough to manipulate just as they were back in Machiavelli’s day. One would have thought—or hoped—that social evolution would have progressed a bit more since then. Instead, Mencken’s depressing prediction seems to at last have come true:

    “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” July 26, 1920, H.L. Mencken in The Evening Sun.

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