Sure, I don’t have much respect for Bush at all. But I do have respect for this board, and GD ain’t the place for flaming threads, IMO.
Anyway, I wonder if any other Presidents did anything similar to this, and what they may’ve learned as a result?
That’s actually where it started.
There was FDR’s Brains Trust. The Wiki article also mentions Wilson having an advisory group of academics with him at Versailles. (Maybe that latter isn’t a good recommendation for the practice. 
)
Sigh, I’ve been spending too much time on the Boards. I read this, and the first thing I thought of was zombi FDR pushing his wheelchair around going, “Brains! Brains! Brains!”
Ah, the Vietnam story. What a relief, after years of being told Iraq wouldn’t be like Vietnam at all.
Related: Depending on what the context is, if one is discussing liberals or merely in the company of liberals I expect to hear Dolchstosslegende used a lot.
Page three of the article mentions this exchange:
The article doesn’t say if Stelzer expanded on his feedback.
Didn’t JFK have a kind of brain trust as well?
(What is it with the initials and brain trusts??)
If Iraq falls, so too will fall… er… Fuck, they’re already gone. Iraq is the last domino. We gotta hold it up!
I think calling presidents by their initials started with FDR. I don’t think Wilson was ever referred to as WW, or Hoover as HCH, or Coolidge as JCC.
Well, I got that, but I thought that JFK had a “brain trust” of sorts, (though not as brainy as Roosevelt’s). I was equating having a brain trust with being known by your initials.
By the way, Woodrow Wilson, these days, would be “Dub-Dub”, “Dub Squared”, or the worst one “Wood-Wil”.
JFK had the “Best and the Brightest” according to David Halberstam.
Well, how about a compromise? Roosevelt had a “Brain Trust”, JFK had a “brain trust”.
JFK also told a dinner of Nobel Laurates, “This the finest collection of minds to grace the White House since Thomas Jefferson last dined here alone.”
Wit has really fallen off sharply at the White House. Johnson had a kind of Hee Haw humor: Reagan had a few good lines, but it wasn’t even clear he understood them.
The linked article has a number of rather disparate observations regarding Mr. Bush’s behaviors and his understanding of the world and his place in it.
I moved this thread out of the Pit at the request of the OP, but if it is going to be simply a string of anti-Bush jokes, I can move it back to the Pit.
It will not stay in this Forum with the current variety of participation.
[ /Moderating ]
I say back to the Pit.
Nets a big story
Back, I say! Cast it back!
It’s like the home run ball that a player from the other team hit.
Throw it back! Throw it back!
At least his comprehension of the world is no longer being filtered through Dick Cheney. A step in the right direction.
And I am not joking.
I know and my point was that maybe the connection betweeen “brain trust” and initials is an artifact of the recent practice of using initials. Maybe earlier presidents had them, such as Wilson’s advisory group at Versailles, but weren’t known by their initials.
It’s also quite likely that information about the president and his methods wasn’t widely reported most of the time. After all, except in wartime the president’s actions had virtually no effect on the life of the average citizen. The desparate times of the great depression brought the federal government to the forefront with a bang and all aspects of FDR’s actions were put under a microscope.