>> Smirk was always out of every loop there was.
This is simply not a factual statement. Every, I mean EVERY, legitimate account of Bush has reflected the fact that he was not only "in the loop" but he was acutely aware of big pictures and details.
This is one [recent] account, from Keith Hennessey. It is consistent with practically every account about Bush, save for a couple of politically/financially motivated bashers:
For more than six years it was my job to help educate President Bush about complex economic policy issues and to get decisions from him on impossibly hard policy choices. In meetings and in the briefing materials we gave him in advance we covered issues in far more depth than I have been discussing with you this quarter because we needed to do so for him to make decisions.
President Bush is extremely smart by any traditional standard. He’s highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer. It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the advisor would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting.
I use words like briefing and presentation to describe our policy meetings with him, but those are inaccurate. Every meeting was a dialogue, and you had to be ready at all times to be grilled by him and to defend both your analysis and your recommendation. That was scary.
We treat Presidential speeches as if they are written by speechwriters, then handed to the President for delivery. If I could show you one experience from my time working for President Bush, it would be an editing session in the Oval with him and his speechwriters. You think that me cold-calling you is nerve-wracking? Try defending a sentence you inserted into a draft speech, with President Bush pouncing on the slightest weakness in your argument or your word choice.
In addition to his analytical speed, what most impressed me were his memory and his substantive breadth. We would sometimes have to brief him on an issue that we had last discussed with him weeks or even months before. He would remember small facts and arguments from the prior briefing and get impatient with us when we were rehashing things we had told him long ago.
And while my job involved juggling a lot of balls, I only had to worry about economic issues. In addition to all of those, at any given point in time he was making enormous decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan, on hunting al Qaeda and keeping America safe. He was making choices not just on taxes and spending and trade and energy and climate and health care and agriculture and Social Security and Medicare, but also on education and immigration, on crime and justice issues, on environmental policy and social policy and politics. Being able to handle such substantive breadth and depth, on such huge decisions, in parallel, requires not just enormous strength of character but tremendous intellectual power. President Bush has both.
Hennessey then goes on to relate the following story to his Stanford class:
On one particularly thorny policy issue on which his advisors had strong and deep disagreements, over the course of two weeks we (his senior advisors) held a series of three 90-minute meetings with the President. Shortly after the third meeting we asked for his OK to do a fourth. He said, “How about rather than doing another meeting on this, I instead tell you now what each person will say.” He then ran through half a dozen of his advisors by name and precisely detailed each one’s arguments and pointed out their flaws. (Needless to say there was no fourth meeting.)
keithhennessey.com
By all credible accounts, Bush was not only smart and involved but had first rate analytical skills and the ability sort out the important from the garbage. There is little doubt he is among the most intelligent men to occupy the office in my lifetime.
Later in Hennessey's article, he explains why he believes Bush has been caricatured as a dumbass. Of course, the liberal media who hated his agenda was a substantial part of it. I have expressed the comments of a relative who knows the Bush family well -- his comments were that GWB doesn't "think on his feet well". That in no way is a commentary on his intellect. Lots of us don't, and you may well be one of them, because you'd never know unless your only contact was under the spotlight of live news coverage.
In short, you're repeating the same, tired, old liberal lies that we've heard for close to 15 years now. It is time you moved on.
>> As to racial tensions, that is because your wingnut friends went apeshit when a black man was put in the White House.
I have known one person who commented on Obama's race, and that was a relative of mine who is an ultra left wing nutjob and voted for him both times. I just haven't seen what you described at all.
The racial problems today were created by Obama's own commentary -- as in the Trayvon Martin case as well as the events leading up the Beer Summit, both excellent examples of where Obama wore his own racism on his sleeve. |
