If you only read one article today, please make is Jacob Weisberg’s Slate piece on Bush’s intelligence (or lack thereof). It’s excellent.
As the best-selling compiler of Bushisms, Weisberg apparently gets asked about this subject a lot. After noting that Bush frequently abuses English grammar, creates ridiculous words, and “habitually says the opposite of what he intends,” Weisberg acknowledges that the president sounds like a “grade-A imbecile.”
Of course, as you’d expect, it’s more complicated than that. The problem, Weisberg explains, is not that Bush is dimwitted; it’s that he prefers stupidity to knowledge. “Bush may not have been born stupid,” Weisberg notes, “but he has achieved stupidity, and now he wears it as a badge of honor…. He chose stupidity. Bush may look like a well-meaning dolt. On consideration, he’s something far more dangerous: a dedicated fool.”
Weisberg lays out four specific explanations to bolster his claim. To say that they are persuasive is an understatement.
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.
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).
And, of course, this lack of intellectual prowess has consequences.
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.