The Misunderestimated Man: How Bush chose stupidity.

[MSgt213]

The short answer is yes.

The long answer is yes and no.

Quotations collected over the years in Slate may leave the impression that George W. Bush is a dimwit. Let's face it: A man who cannot talk about education without making a humiliating grammatical mistake ("The illiteracy level of our children are appalling"); who cannot keep straight the three branches of government ("It's the executive branch's job to interpret law"); who coins ridiculous words ("Hispanos," "arbolist," "subliminable," "resignate," "transformationed"); who habitually says the opposite of what he intends ("the death tax is good for people from all walks of life!") sounds like a grade-A imbecile.

And if you don't care to pursue the matter any further, that view will suffice. George W. Bush has governed, for the most part, the way any airhead might, undermining the fiscal condition of the nation, squandering the goodwill of the world after Sept. 11, and allowing huge problems (global warming, entitlement spending, AIDS) to metastasize toward catastrophe through a combination of ideology, incomprehension, and indifference. If Bush isn't exactly the moron he sounds, his synaptic misfirings offer a plausible proxy for the idiocy of his presidency.

In reality, however, there's more to it. Bush's assorted malapropisms, solecisms, gaffes, spoonerisms, and truisms tend to imply that his lack of fluency in English is tantamount to an absence of intelligence. But as we all know, the inarticulate can be shrewd, the fluent fatuous. In Bush's case, the symptoms point to a specific malady—some kind of linguistic deficit akin to dyslexia—that does not indicate a lack of mental capacity per se.

Bush also compensates with his non-verbal acumen. As he notes, "Smart comes in all kinds of different ways." The president's way is an aptitude for connecting to people through banter and physicality. He has a powerful memory for names, details, and figures that truly matter to him, such as batting averages from the 1950s. Bush also has a keen political sense, sharpened under the tutelage of Karl Rove.

http://www.slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2100064&

[Misunderestimator]

1. I met a savant when I was a child....

who could recite the entire Dallas Phonebook. He could also quote the phone number if you gave him a name, or the name if you gave him a number. He could hardly put two words together in a sentence, and his IQ was well below normal. But, I was very impressed by the man.

I'm not impressed with ANYTHING coming out of GWB.

On edit... technically the term is idiot savant, but I don't like the term, so I just use savant, for Bush I just use idiot.

[Career Prole]

5. The only problem with splitting up idiot and savant

is that in French a savant is a smart person...one who understands, whereas idiot savant translates roughly as, er...a clever idiot.
Vive la guerre! translates as "Republican party platform".

[Misunderestimator]

7. I thought about that, but...

I've only heard the term savant used in the context of idiot-savant, so I took my liberty with it. :)

[XanaDUer]

2. Bush chose to coast on "good looks"?

:puke:

[buff2]

3. That's pure bullshit

I get sick and tired of people trying to make up excuses for that idiot's ignorance.He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer and everyone knows it. He just has a zillion repukes around him to cover his ass...lie,lie,and lie some more for him. Thank Geesus I'm one of the few that's not that gullible. That moron makes me sick,with all the shit he does and everyone's there to wipe his ass and clean up the mess. :puke:

[JHB]

6. They're not covering his ass here, they're exposing it.

Other people have pointed this out: Bush isn't an idiot because of something as simple as a low IQ. He's quite sharp and inventive on something he enjoys, like a political dirty tricks campaign or playing "loyalty enforcer" for his dad's campaign. Just so long as he doesn't have to sort out a bunch of "petty details".

Which, of course, is WORSE than simply being a little "slow". Bush is actively dumb.

More from the article (the real meat of it):
The most obvious expression of Bush's choice of ignorance is that, at the age of 57, he knows nothing about policy or history. After years of working as his dad's spear-chucker in Washington, he didn't understand the difference between Medicare and Medicaid, the second- and third-largest federal programs. Well into his plans for invading Iraq, Bush still couldn't get down the distinction between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, the key religious divide in a country he was about to occupy. Though he sometimes carries books for show, he either does not read them or doesn't absorb anything from them. Bush's ignorance is so transparent that many of his intimates do not bother to dispute it even in public.
***
A second, more damning aspect of Bush's mind-set is that he doesn't want to know anything in detail, however important. Since college, he has spilled with contempt for knowledge, equating learning with snobbery and making a joke of his own anti-intellectualism. (" wrote a book at Yale; I read one," he quipped at a black-tie event.) By O'Neill's account, Bush could sit through an hourlong presentation about the state of the economy without asking a single question. ("I was bored as hell," the president shot back, ostensibly in jest.)

Closely related to this aggressive ignorance is a third feature of Bush's mentality: laziness. Again, this is a lifelong trait. Bush's college grades were mostly Cs (including a 73 in Introduction to the American Political System). At the start of one term, the star of the Yale football team spotted him in the back row during the shopping period for courses. "Hey! George Bush is in this class!" Calvin Hill shouted to his teammates. "This is the one for us!" As governor of Texas, Bush would take a long break in the middle of his short workday for a run followed by a stretch of video golf or computer solitaire.

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).

[central scrutinizer]

8. I'm not so sure

I think he is a con man who has shrewdly chosen this persona. And it has paid off - how many times do you meet someone who actually believes he is a regular guy and can envision him as a drinking buddy. The truth is he is not a regular guy - he was born into wealth and power in the Northeast and has never had to work a day in his life. His aw shucks, folksy manner is an act to mask a wealthy, privileged, Ivy League frat boy interior. Calling him stupid actually plays into the Repugs hand - you must be an elitist who hates the common people. Just like John Kerry and his millionaire wife.

[Kinkistyle]

4. Its not the dumbness that reviles me about Bush.

Its that he is just a nasty, vicious, petty little jerk. Some of the people I have been most drawn to in my life have not fallen on the
"right-side of the bell-curve" so to speak. But they were also fundamentally good, compassionate, honest people who I could I felt were courageous people I could really trust. I, being the snively, morally ambiguous nerd, I tended to "feed off" these people's simple moral forthrightness.

There were also folks who weren't necessarily "book-smart" but were exceedingly "street-smart" and who probably couldn't answer when the Magna Carta (is that an Autobot or a Decepticon?) was written, but could spot a con or a lie from a mile away due to their acute attunement to human psychology.

Bush is like the worse of all world. Lazy, immoral, incurious, violent AND stupid.

[scrotim]

9. i read this this morning. seems dead-on to me. great article. n/t