He makes Bush 2 look like Carl Sagan.
Toddler’s busy day
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11 responses to “Toddler’s busy day”
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I was thinking about this the other day, as it happens – about how only 20 years ago we were pointing and laughing at Dubya for being horrendously stupid.
And I wonder if it’s time to revisit that. I’m going to stick my neck out here and suggest that, actually, Bush wasn’t all that stupid. Obviously he wasn’t as clever as Clinton or Obama or his father; but they were all very clever. His problem was that he was bang average, but that running a country demands rather more than that. This is true even for small and all-things-considered minor countries: running Luxembourg or Uruguay would also demand well-above-average abilities.
Bush got away with it for a couple of reasons. First, he was able to leverage the fact that he was average politically: that spoke to people, because most people are, almost necessarily, roughly average as well. So a little good ol’ boy homeliness can appear to make up for being not the brightest. Appear to, and – to some extent – actually make up for it.
Second, he didn’t actually have contempt for smart people. And that’s also fine. A President’s job is to preside. Even if we think that the Constitution makes the President a kind of elected monarch in many ways, the point would stand that a monarch doesn’t have to be on top of everything: a king is good at kinging if and to the extent that he has smart advisors and is just smart enough to make decisions based on their advice. Bush was capable of that. He could recognise whom to appoint, and he could listen to them, and – average as he was – he was capable of making decisions based on that advice.
Bluntly, he might have struggled with articulacy, but he wasn’t scared of polysyllables, and he wasn’t intimidated by people who used them.
This is not an encomium for Dubya. As I said, he was an average bloke doing a job that demands much more. Many of his policies were counterproductive, stupid, or regrettable at best.
And yet the point stands that, forced to choose between someone average with a decent respect for extraordinary ability, and someone who is well below average who has contempt for anyone but himself, you’d have to opt for Dubya.
What a strange time to be alive.
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Whoever drew this doesn’t seem to know where the Caribbean Sea is. The bit of ocean labelled “Caribbean Sea” on the map is not the Caribbean Sea. It more or less corresponds to the Sargasso Sea.
Around the time of the first Trump inauguration I read a suggestion that George W. Bush was looking forward to it, as he would be promoted from his position as the worst President ever.
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I noticed that too, and also that the Caribbean wasn’t changed to America along with the Atlantic and Pacific. A minor oversight I’m sure. It’s the America Sea! It’s East America Ocean and West America Ocean! Get your shit together AI slopmeisters!
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That reminds me of the graphics in WWII newsreels with a giant Swastika blanketing continental Europe. So the question is – have people forgotten or do they not actually care.
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Bush got away with it for a couple of reasons. First, he was able to leverage the fact that he was average politically: that spoke to people, because most people are, almost necessarily, roughly average as well.
Not only that, he was able to convince people he was outside of politics, not a politician, in spite of the fact that he was deeply embedded as an insider. I am not one who is convinced by that outsider status; we need people who understands how the political system works. They can say they want to move away from politics as usual, but even that requires understanding not only how government works, and how it could work. All Trump knows is how to break things.
Trump truly is a political outsider; that’s one place he didn’t have to lie to say it. People I know have been so determined we need political outsiders, even though they think Jimmy Carter’s presidency failed (and it sort of did, though not on every front). Other things they tell me is that they don’t want a president who is smarter than they are. I do; I may be smart enough to get a Ph.D. in Environmental Science, which is a difficult field, but that doesn’t give me what I need to be president. And with a B.A. in Political Science, I know more about it than the average American, but it isn’t enough.
They also say government needs to be run like a business, by a businessman. Well, we have one now. But government shouldn’t be run like a business; it needs to be run like a government, which does not have the mission of making the most money for a few people (though you wouldn’t know that to watch it in action). Government is about providing for the welfare (beyond just that pejorative term) of all the people, an idea which is anathema to business…and, unfortunately, to many of the voters. Also, if you want government run like a business, you need to accept the national debt; businesses float on debt. So do households. For all those people who tell me they have to maintain household budgets, I beg to differ. Do they have a mortgage? A car payment? Credit cards? They are also floating on debt. Some, perhaps many, are in further over their heads than the government is.
Trump, as both an outsider and a businessman, and someone who is not smarter than (or as smart as) the people who tell me all these things, is demonstrating very clearly why they are wrong.
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The other thing about families (and businesses, for that matter)–they don’t intentionally decrease their revenues when they are in debt. Yet the Republicans solution to almost everything is to cut taxes.
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He makes Bush 2 look like Carl Sagan.
Come on, there’s limits!
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I know, that was a stretch.
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An Acolyte could take that personally!
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Noooooo, the implication is that Sagan=epitome of non-dull brain!
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I know, it was just a shock – I’ve never seen Dubya and Sagan mentioned in the same sentence before.
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