- The Misunderestimated Man – How Bush chose stupidity. (GWB is Bizzaro Bush)
A fourth and final quality of Bush’s mind is that it does not think. The president can’t tolerate debate about issues. Offered an option, he makes up his mind quickly and never reconsiders. At an elementary school, a child once asked him whether it was hard to make decisions as president. “Most of the decisions come pretty easily for me, to be frank with you.” By leaping to conclusions based on what he “believes,” Bush avoids contemplating even the most obvious basic contradictions: between his policy of tax cuts and reducing the deficit; between his call for a humble foreign policy based on alliances and his unilateral assertion of American power; between his support for in-vitro fertilization (which destroys embryos) and his opposition to fetal stem-cell research (because it destroys embryos).
- Frontline: The Jesus Factor – Examining George W. Bush’s personal religious journey, its impact on his political career and presidency, and the growing influence of America’s evangelical Christians. — sobering…
(notes: unsurprisingly he believes that non-Christians are going to hell. undoubtedly he thinks that he’s not going there… Being evangenical means never having to say your sorry? Only Christians have received faith-based funding… Hooray for taking advantage of blind-faith to justify all kinds of sausage-grinding activities. Didn’t he swear to uphold the Constitution?)
- Monkey Media Report (fast becoming a daily read) hits it right on the head:
A wide variety of officials in the administration had advised Bush to apologize on Wednesday when he gave interviews to two Arab television channels and were puzzled when he did not, senior U.S. officials said. An apology had been recommended in the talking points Bush received from the State Department and elsewhere, the officials said. Senior administration aides then made a push overnight for him to say he was sorry during his news conference with Abdullah, the officials said.
Yeah, you read that right. Ignoring the advice of his own administration, the President avoided a simple, direct “I’m sorry.” Is there a better definition of incompetence? But wait, the idiocy continues. Despite the latest round of stories claiming Bush has now said the words, what he really said [rm] was that he’d, ahem, told King Abdullah he was sorry. If you think the difference is trivial, well, you’ve got your head up your ass. Rest assured the lack of a direct “I’m sorry” is being noted with disgust all over the world.
- TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB – Seymour Hersh’s scathing write-up in the New Yorker. If you don’t read anything else about this whole mess (you’d probably need to be hiding under a rock … or in grad school to miss it).
I don’t think I know anyone who’s going to be voting for Bush in the fall, but if I did, I think I would have to urge them to think about what kind of person GWB and how his decisions have impacted our country in the world…