Actually they do give MBAs out to the rich and powerful. You don’t fuck with a legacy who can wind up funnellng millions of dollars your way. I am sure you heard of gentlemens C’s. You put the important guys through.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/11/politics/uwire/main3927378.shtml Plus he set a new record for vacation days. Somebody had to run the country while he played around.
It wasn’t always that way. Maybe during that clip he was having an Old School Will Ferrell moment but at one time it seems he could at least pull off eloquence.
Holy crap. That’s kind of an eye opener.
He was, if anything, a figurehead for this group:
Note some of the signatories to the statement of principles and other reports/letters towards the bottom of page, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Bolton, Armitage, Abrams, Jeb Bush.
So, did Bush surround himself with these men or did THEY simply surround HIM, their hand-picked figurehead? Is there a difference? I think so.
I read their 300 plus page paper on “The New American Century” some years back and it laid out their plans, including regime change in Iraq, the establishment of permanent US bases there, increasing military/war spending dramatically, and an expansion of executive powers.
Possibly the most disturbing passage refered to the “peace dividend” and the need to convince the public that they were not going to see any of it, that it had to be consumed with military spending.
And, they lament, the public would have to be likewise convinced to support the regime change plan in Iraq/a US invasion.
They speculated that it might be necessary for there to be an attack on US soil to sway public sentiment in these regards. Just an aside, casually included, not overtly “advocating” for such a thing, just pointing out that such an event might be the only thing that would allow them to accomplish their agenda. It literally sent chills up my spine. :eek:
Coincidence? Amazing psychic powers? :dubious: They accomplished damn near everything else they wrote of in this paper.
P.s. (missed the edit window), this passage, from the link above, says essentially the same thing, but is not the one I was referring to. Same gist though. So they mentioned that more than once.
"Section V of Rebuilding America’s Defenses, entitled “Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant Force”, includes the sentence: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor”
Another thread on this subject awhile back:
Yeah.
I had forgotten that he actually seemed pretty bright early on.
I always pay attention to the governor’s races in TX, CA and NY and now I do remember seeing that.
And then 10 years later, we have the unfocused bumbling that we have all come to know and love.
I have heard that the rigors of being POTUS age the current inhabitant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, but this seems to be more (or less) than that.
This was a debate with Bush running for re-election and yet still he must have (at least) thought he was still running the country at the same time.
Dealing with both may have overloaded his mental abilities.
But, that having been said, I still think I saw Cheney’s hand up Bush’s butt more than once and that can’t be good for a man’s self-esteem.
He learned to fly a jet fighter! Even if he was a somewhat disinterested soldier and performed in a lackluster way, it still takes a fair amount of smarts to learn the things a person has to learn to get one of those things off the ground and return it safely.
And Bush was a competent and enjoyable speaker (though as Tom Brokaw once commented to Laura in an interview, he did tend to wander off into the verbal wilderness sometimes) until the media turned on him, culminating in a press conference where they began demanding that he admit some mistake, any mistake, in his conduct of the war. That was the first time I’d seen him stumble and perform poorly, appearing to be at a loss for words. From that time on he appeared to be hamstrung when speaking, as if constantly aware of the dozens of different ways everything he said would be parsed to make him look bad.
Warren Beatty has the same problem: he’s so aware of how anything he says can be distorted that he becomes painfully awkward and difficult to listen to whenever he’s speaking without a script, and I don’t think anyone here would claim that he’s stupid.
To me Bush’s extemporaneous speaking performances are indicative of “paralysis by analysis” - a quality that pretty much defined Carter and Clinton’s modus operandi while in office but not Bush’s. Bush’s paralysis by analysis seemed only to be a problem in dealing with the press. Other than that, he seemed to be a man guided by his pre-established principles and a big-picture sense that cut through all the bullshit, and I believe it is this quality that has given rise to the notion that he was intellectually lazy and/or stupid, whereas the reality is that he simply didn’t allow himself to get bogged down in mounds of conflicting data and examinations that would ultimately prove nothing and settle nothing.
Take Iraq for example. Bush believed that Iraq was a danger to the stability of the entire area, and probably most especially was a threat to Israel…a threat that could possibly have eventually dragged us into a war with the entire area. He also believed that Hussein was a loose cannon who either had or would eventually develop WMD, and that in addition to being a threat to his neighbors and Israel, a synergistic relationship very likely existed or would come to exist between Hussein (and/or his henchmen) and Al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups out to attack the U.S. He obviously felt that these threats needed to be eliminated, both for our own security and that of the Middle East itself, and so he took action accordingly. In other words, he felt that the impotent haggling and niggling which was all that was coming from the U.N., and endless conflicting reports as to whether or not Hussein had WMDs, would never accomplish anything by way of reducing those threats…and so he did what needed to be done in a big-picture sense to protect Middle East stability and the security of the U.S. itself, rather than doing what a Carter or Clinton would have done, which would have amounted to nothing because they were so bogged down in data and by political considerations that they couldn’t make up their minds.
Additionally, Bush hoped that Iraq would become a democracy and that democracy there might well pave the way for democracy in other areas of the Middle East also, which would be a win-win for both the citizens of those countries and the rest of the world as well. And the more that time goes by the more we are seeing democracy beginning to take hold there, and in my opinion that’s a very good thing.
I believe that once events finish unfolding, history will be very, very kind to George W. Bush.
They do in fact give out Harvard degrees to the children of the rich and powerful. One of Bush’s Harvard professors remembered him as callous, entitled and arrogant. That said, I don’t recall he said W was stupid.
If W was a stupid youth, I remind people of Michael Moore’s clips of W from the Arbusto oil days where he was amazingly articulate as compared to the doofus who ran for office in 2000.
A lazy and wasted youth perhaps that wasted an education, but he was no Dan Quayle when he was younger.
By all accounts, he was a lousy and dangerous pilot who got post by being the son of a Congressman.
I believe that history has judged W harshly and will continue to do so based on the consensus opinion that he was a lousy president based on two awful terms of office where there was no success except electoral to point to, and one disaster after another.
I’ve read that in person Bush is still like that. He’s a clear and articulate speaker. But apparently at some point he decided he needed to present a different persona when addressing the public - which badly backfired on him. What he apparently felt was a deliberate and plain-spoken demeanor came across as fumbling and inarticulate.
Many agree that most often he looked confused, if that wasn’t what he was going for an intelligent man would have changed his persona. Just sayin’.