What is an example of a White House where the President was enormously intelligent and he surrounded himself with idiots? Not being facetious...I ask because I truly don't know and am curious on the comparison. Also, there should be enough intelligent people out there to have really smart guys at all positions of government, including President. Problem with all politics, of course, flows back to money.
Well show me where another modern country has had a man of such limited intellectual power or at least accomplishment and curiosity. Interestingly there was speculation at the time that Bush I took the young Dan Quayle as VP because most of the leading candidates made it hard for Bush I to look better.
...how cute. Now let's read what I wrote and tell me where I said that was the case. I was telling you what people who have talked to the guy in private and people who have covered the guy for years have said. And to think I almost forgot why I avoided this place for a while.
What about a really brilliant man who was wise enough to surround himself with people who were pretty smart and wise themselves, and still be able to make his own decisions when it came down to it? Let's look at some past presidents... Jimmy Carter - peanut farmer/Nuclear scientist JFK - war hero/pulitzer prize winner Nixon - lawyer/ WWII navy commander Bush Sr - Phi Beta Kappa at Yale, Director of the CIA Clinton - Rhodes Scholar/Lawyer Reagan - 53 movies/President of screen actors guild Bush Jr???? Never ran a successful business Never was in a war Never accomplished anything Was a part owner of a baseball team Worst qualified to be president, and the worst president ever.
Well, Melissa Gilbert was also President of the SAG, and Traci Lords has been in over 100 movies. So which one of them, like Reagan, do you think would unseat Jimmy Carter, re-write the tax code and "win the Cold War?" Now, just to be devil's advocate, I'll point out that W beat an incumbent governor in the state with the second largest electorate in the country. And he chose one of the riskiest possible businesses to run: independent oil exploration, even though with a Harvard MBA, he probably could've gotten a pretty decent i-banking or corporate management job, and ridden the biggest bull market in history to a multi-million dollar fortune (or, admittedly, just crashed and burned with the Michael Milkins and, uh, Neil Bushes of the world). He also helped secure funding for a multi-million dollar stadium for his sports franchise: something Bud Adams, owner of an NFL team in the Football Capital of the Known Universe, couldn't do.
Yeah, that 68% foreign policy approval rating over the course of his presidency sucked! http://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/DailyNews/poll_clintonlegacy010117.html
He wouldn't, because he wouldn't be able to answer any interview questions or complete any mock scenario exercises, involving concepts of scope, risk, planning, projection, resource estimation, deliverables and timelines, not to mention ideas of budget, balance, and profit.
Hi, halfbreed. I just remembered to look into this thread again. I read your post and wanted some clarification... are you saying that Bush sounds worse today because he's trying to speak in Washington English? Because that wasn't my thought at all. He sounded more intelligent as governor, and he spoke in a more intelligent manner, with less of a pronounced accent. How what he does today morphs into Washington English doesn't compute to me. If anything, I would argue that he used Washington English, if that represents a better vocabulary and pronunciation, when he was governor. That's why it worries me that he's become, IMO, way stupider (BBS English, lol!) sounding now, both in pronunciation and content. Keep D&D Civil.
Those don't sound like mid-70s i-banking job interview questions, which in W's case may have just meant doing the Skull & Bones secret handshake. Of course i've never been an i-banker, and wasn't actually alive back then, so i wouldn't know. But even if they were, how do we know W didn't pay attention in Financial Statement Analysis or Operations Management class, just to make up for that D he got in Oil and Gas Accounting.
He was, but, like Bush, he got in on his name. That's probably why it wasn't included in the original post.
President Bush today acknowledged that U.S. authorities have held suspected terrorists in secret CIA prisons around the world. http://www.cnn.com/
I think what was meant by sounding worse today is because he's trying to use language he's not used to using. When he was governor he might not have had a superior vocabulary (or maybe to some he did) but he was using language he was comfortable with. I believe what the author was saying is that he's now speaking like he thinks a President should speak and because of this he's using patterns of speech and language that he isn't used to. The author basically said that in trying to sound more like a President, Bush actually makes himself sound less intelligent and more like a Texas hick. (At least that's what I got out of it). Personally, I don't know what the answer is.
