Let me start this out by saying, I don’t care for the current President, George W. Bush. I believe he’s on track to be the second worst President this country has ever had, right after Franklin Roosevelt.

Having said that, let me, in his “defense,” try to put something to rest. I’m going to try to euthanize an opinion that won’t die. But even after I kill it, it’ll probably keep coming back like Freddy Kruger of Elm Street, Michael Myers of Halloween, and Kenny McCormnik of South Park.

Ready?

Bush isn’t stupid.

Over the last seven years, his critics, mostly his liberal critics, have taken some kind of comfort in making that assertion. And what do they have as evidence? As near as I can tell, it’s his malapropisms. Oh, and then there’s the widely circulated e-mail from the once fictitious Lovenstein Institute of Scranton purporting that he has the lowest I.Q. of any U.S. President in the last 50 years. (I say once fictitious because soon after the hoax was exposed, and it was shown the Lovenstein Institute didn’t exist, someone registered it on the Internet and now it does “exist” somewhere out in cyberspace.)

The problem with using his speaking ineptitude as evidence of a less than stellar IQ is that there are members of Mensa who speak like that. Yeah, I know one: Dave Duffy, the publisher of Backwoods Home Magazine. He’s a Mensa member, runs a successful magazine, and is one of the smartest people I know, but still says things a la Bush, that even after knowing him for over forty years leave me gasping for air.

Let me offer some real evidence that belies the rants of Bush’s critics:
He graduated from Yale. Yeah, daddy might have gotten him in, but he had to get himself out. And he might not have graduated at the top of his class, but he graduated.

He has an MBA from Harvard. Some have suggested daddy bought him the degree. Unless you can provide evidence, I’ve got to discount that assertion as more useless ranting. Besides, I’m going to ask you to provide a list of the Harvard professors who were bought off. There would then be a scandal here and it should be exposed.

He piloted an F-106. Yes, you can say he didn’t complete his National Guard obligation. I don’t know whether he did or not. But he did fly a complicated modern jet fighter. That’s not a piece of equipment you’re going to put an idiot at the controls of.

He speaks a second language. Now, I understand that even retarded people can speak, but not many are multilingual and none have graduated from Yale, Harvard Business School, or flown a modern jet fighter.

And this is what pisses me off the most: Time that could have and should have been spent criticizing his policies or rectifying some of the mistakes he made were spent on the self-serving fiction that he’s stupid. I’ve come to think of those who have let this supposed lack of mental acuity distract them as being the real idiots.

Duffy, if you happen to read this, I’ve changed my mind. I think you’re an idiot, after all. (Hey, having never complimented him in over forty years, I’m not going to start now.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Politics and Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.