Thats pretty much the recollection of everyone who has dealt with him from what I have read. Karl ROve himself stated that the folksiness was an act.
Going over the books of the man himself and his subordinates, its amazing how many times his insticnt was right, only for him to then be “guided” by his advisors. Gaza, Climate Change, stem cell research.
The one unimpeachable success of his administration, support for AIDS medication in Africa was one where he made the decision himself and no one had any interest in trying to talk him out of it.
And then there is the commentary of his first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, who said that Bush “was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people” during Cabinet meetings and failed to engage him with any questions when they met one-on-one.
:dubious: Yes, well, Dr. Hennessy, if he actually listened to you and acted on your advice about economic policy, I’m not too impressed with your brains either.
Not an idiot. Just a hopeless panderer. He was having some polling issues and decided that a major role in the biggest conservative news story of the day would shore up his Bible-thumping credentials.
As I pointed before in another thread, I wondered why is that Republicans want to tell others about how smart Bush was. It is really making Bush the lesser to deserve even worse titles that historians had given him so far.
The choice for historians was that bush the lesser was either an incompetent and dumb guy about what to expect in Iraq; or that he was really smart, that he knew what to expect and he did not care anyhow; so he lied to the American people to benefit the corporations and oil companies involved in the future “reconstruction”.
So instead of being a mental midget that deserves our pity the recent efforts to point at him as a smart guy only tell me that Bush II was indeed a rat bastard that deserves to have his ass hauled to the International Court of Justice at The Hague.
I’m not sure how Jeb! demonstrating his ability to dog whistle constitutes evidence for his stupidity. Evidence for other reasons for not voting for him, sure…
What makes you think that saying he was smart is somehow overruling his (many) mistakes and error as President?
Lots of smart men (and the occasional woman) have been horrible leaders. Otherwise competent and intelligent men have made serious errors (often a series off) major errors and miscalculations in all walks of life, often despite advice to the contrary
The argument that I (who is neither a Republican nor an American) is that the common depiction of him as a simpleton is in inaccurate, an inaccuracy partly enabled by his own affected mannerism.
It does nothing to deflect from the monumental mistakes made by him in Iraq and elsewhere.
But the point was that many of those were not mistakes. There is an old phrase in Spanish that goes like “To eat fish and to lie you have to be careful” as in to smart or cunning (in the case of the fish is to void the spines that can give you trouble).
Being smart does point to even more deceitful cunning than what many thought it took place.