Bush Not Fit for Leadership
by KTKDecember 11th, 2006
Cenk Uygur of the Hufington Post comes a bit late to this realization, but he has it exactly right:
Never has there been a public official more unequipped to be President of the United States of America than George W. Bush. The man is simply not up to the job. Even if he really wanted to be or cared to be an effective president, he … could … not … do … it.
He can’t do it on a boat, he can’t do it with a (pet) goat. He can’t do it in the Green Zone, he can’t do it back at home. This man cannot be a good president, Sam-I-Am.
He flat out does not have the intellectual capacity to carry out the requirements of the job.
 Uygur assembles a telling list of incidents in which Bush’s intellectual vacuity was not only unmistakeably apparent but formed a barrier between him and the people trying to help him do his job - to the point that Bush was, in the estimation of Republican insiders who were trying to support his policies, simply unable to cope with the problem at hand because he could not or would not engage it mentally. Typically, when presented with information or alternatives on issues of the greatest consequence, Bush’s reaction is to ask no questions whatsoever, leaving his aides to guess at what he thinks or knows. The most recent example was the ISG Report:
When [Lawrence Eagleburger, ISG committee member] met with President Bush, along with all of the members of the Iraq Study Group, he said that after they presented their findings - Bush asked no questions.
Eagleburger remarked, “I don’t recall, seriously, that he asked any questions.”
Stop. Think about that for a second. There are 79 recommendations made by the group. They took nine months and talked to everyone involved about the situation in Iraq. They have interesting, sometimes controversial positions, some of which Bush theoretically agrees and disagrees with - and he asked absolutely no questions. Not one.
That is beyond unbelievable. You would have to be stupendously stupid, mentally stultified and intellectually inoperative not to be able to come up with one question to this group who has presented the most important report of your presidency to you.
. . . No one could be callous enough to receive incredibly important recommendations on how to rescue this mission and not ask a single question.
You know why he didn’t ask anything? Because he’s stupid. He is afraid that he is going to ask a dumb question, or it’s possible that he doesn’t even have the capacity to formulate one in his tiny, little mind. So, instead he sits there like a bump on a log. The ISG members must have been at a loss for what to do. I can’t imagine any of them anticipated that there would be no interaction with the president. That he would just sit there with a dumb look on his face and not make one comment or have one question.
It was not an isolated incident. He exhibited exactly the same behavior in numerous critical moments of his presidency: when he was told the levees were in danger of failure during Hurricane Katrina; when he was first briefed by his own Treasury Secretary on the range of budget-related issues he would have to deal with; when he received the fateful intelligence memo titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”; when he was told the World Trade Center had been struck by terrorists. In each case he asked no questions, and had no response whatsoever (well, OK - he dismissed the CIA briefer with the Bin Laden memo by saying “You’ve covered your ass now”, and, of course, he manfully struggled with “My Pet Goat” for 7 minutes during the 9/11 event, which I suppose qualifies as intellectual effort in his case). His first reactions were determined by no degree of cognitive engagement with the issues at all, nor apparently did he ever grapple with them in any searching and honest way.
He is simply too intellectually limited, and perhaps too self-conscious about it, to act in a responsible capacity on important issues requiring reality-based comprehension and decision-making. This is hardly a surprise to anyone who has been watching, but Uygur’s article is useful for the evidence he assembles from non-Bush-hating sources. Read the whole thing, and follow all the links. It’s depressing.
Categories: Culture, Economics, Fiasco, General, Iraq, Katrina, News & Current Events, Politics, Terrorism |
What’s depressing to me is that his stupidity was obvious to me from the first time I saw him speak. He may be a few degrees stupider than I imagiined at the time, but he always looked and sounded like a dunce to me from the beginning. And yet somehow he was able to convince enough people, both up close and on the campaign trail, that he was smart enough to be President of the United States.
So are all those people who supported him, donated to him, campaigned for him and voted for him stupider than he is? Or was there something about him that I missed — some veneer of intelligence that I couldn’t see?
It’s depressing to me because unless we understand how it happened it could conceivably happen again.
Ignorance is bliss and the Christina right is among the most ignorant. There is simply no reason, except that people want to believe what they want to believe, that Bush should have been voted in for a second term. Open your eyes brothers and sisters, the guy in no Christian.
Bush is a good president. He is a man of integrety. I certainly would trust him more than any democrat I know.
Your insults are childish and trite. Too bad you liberals can’t grow up.
Thank you, Fred, for clearing that up for me.
Personally, I don’t think the pillars of the Republican community thought Bush was smart; they just though he could win an election. Competence wasn’t the issue. Getting in the White House was.