There is a reason a horse has never been President.

There is a reason a horse has never been President. You can't run a country on horse sense.

In keeping with the theme of this piece, I will try and keep this little rambling in quasi-regular guy American Speak, so that the hate mail that normally accompanies these postings can be focused on the true points and not the ones that those sub-geniuses invent in their Budweiser soaked brains.

OK, so think back.

Do you remember WAY BACK WHEN, when the Red Neck now squatting in the White House, first became a blip on the national radar? Remember when everyone in the known universe thought that George W. Bush might be too dumb to be The President of the United States?

Wha Hapin!?

Has that much time passed that the questions about Bush's intellectual aptitude faded into the recesses of our collective minds?

Remember right after 9/11, when seemingly every man, woman and child in the nation, liek they all took some kind’a STUPID DRUG, actually thought that his intuitive rather than critical outlook on the world, its history and its potential future seemed to be just what we needed and they were seemingly anxious to blow INTO proportion something resembling heroic qualities in the President? (QUTOE: "George Bush is the president; he makes the decisions; and, you know, as just one American, wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where." - Dan Rather)

Then, as if on cue, the Democrats decided to roll over and let up on Bush, fearing as they are becoming famous for doing, that it was politically counterproductive to attack the President’s intelligence (QUTOE: “Calling Bush dumb plays directly into Bush's strength, which is that he comes across as a regular guy." - Bruce Reed of the Democratic Leadership Council - 2002)

So, with no one with the guts to yell out that the Emperor Wears no Clothes, for most of the last six years, the questionability of the intelligence, of lack there of, of the most powerful man in the world, has remained and open, dirty little secret and a taboo subject.

Yeah, of course there have always seen people like me that have been screaming form the balcony, “Are you blind!? This guy a retard!” but we have been, as always, dismissed as out of hand, disrespectful and conspiracy theory spinning, liberal, wacky Bush-haters (GUILTY AS CHARGED!). What made matters MORE infuriating, was that by the 2004 election, the question completely turned around. Democrats were painfully silent about Bush's lack of intellect, and Republicans couldn’t say two words without gleefully attacking John Kerry as an egghead.

Being dumb was as American as Apple Pie and Anti-intellectualism was triumphant.

FINALY it is becoming exponentially clear that Bush's status as a 'non-rocket scientist' is not just ‘a serious problem’ but dangerous. Now I’m not talking about his often ridiculed problem — and fodder for late-night comedians — of being incapable of enunciating the most basic multi-syllabic words, but what I AM pointing at is Mr. Bush’s shocking lack of intellectual curiosity about ANY complex geo-political / geo-societal problem that is facing the world today.

In the book, "The One Percent Doctrine," the author, Ron Suskind sketches out and connects the dots (for all you non-intellectual gut feelers) of what exactly The President of the United States’ intellectual limits are.

“Bush”, writes Suskind, "is not much of a reader. He prefers verbal briefings and often makes a horse-sense judgment based on how confident his briefer seems in what he's saying”.

One of countless examples of this happened in August of 2001, when the CIA was in a hot panic about growing intelligence that pointed 'an impending, soon to happen terrorist attack on the United States' and they drafted a detailed a report, entitled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." for the president.

A briefing followed and the CIA staffer selected to download this information to the President in a face-to-face meeting with Bush was found by the president to be “insufficiently confident” and was insignificantly dismissed by the president saying, According to Ron Suskind’s book, "All right, you've covered your ass, now" That, as we all know now, turned out to be a fairly disastrous judgment. If you ever wondered what the president of the Untied States was thinking and what that seemingly bewildered and stunned, deer in the headlights look on his face meant, when he was told about the attack on the World Trade, that we ALL SAW on national television, it is easy to figure out.

DOH!

Yes “The Bushes” are easy to dismiss Suskind's reporting, but it connects and fills in SO MUCH OF THE PICUTRE that has emerged from OTHER sources, like a loyal Bushie L. Paul Bremer III's account of his term as the head of Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority, when he depicted the president as uninterested in the KEY, CENTRAL questions surrounding the rebuilding and occupying the country after the war.

Any tacit look at the video of a presidential during the meeting that came to light this year of Bush being briefed on the budding Hurricane named Katrina and its potential impact, makes clear the distinctions of who is present at that meeting and who is not.

The president’s subordinates look sincerely, deeply concerned about the impending, potential catastrophe, where as Bush appears blasé, not even engaged enough to muster a single question. And then, of course there was one my fav; in 2001 when Russian President Vladimir Putin shared with Bush the story of being given a cross by his mother, which the president invested profound significance in, telling reporters later that he had found the Russian President, “to be very straightforward and trustworthy….I was able to get a sense of his soul."

(Insert spooky music here and deal the tarot cards)

Liberal ridicule of the president's intelligence has been adamantly blasted as cultural snobbery by “The Bushies” over the last six years. We don't like his pickup or his accent, so, the accusation goes, so we conceal our blue-state intolerance behind a mask of intellectual arrogance.

YES! That’s IT! Everyone run to your windows right now, throw them open and shout out:

I’M SMARTER THAN GEORGE W BUSH AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE!

Isn’t it clear now, albeit late, that the more we see how Bush operates, the more we can see we were DAMN RIGHT from the beginning?

YES! Yes it does matter that the president values his GUT reaction over and DISDAINS them that’s got dat book learnin', which is FAR from Bush Simplistic as being JUST a question of cultural style.

Si, Si, Si!

The president's narrow intellectual perspective has serious and real consequences, sometimes cataclysmic ones, as we are seeing play out ALL OVER THE WORLD RIGHT NOW!

I won’t say that it is impossible for presidents to succeed without being intellectuals themselves. We have seen proof of the opposite throughout jhistory that THAT just ain’t so.


No. It isn’t that Bush isn’t intellectual…HELL NO…it’s that he is NON and ANTI - INTELLECTUAL!

The president of the United States, our supposed leader and example of what all Americans, especially children, should be able to look to as a model of what an American should be, viscerally despises intellectuals.

The president said, "What angered me was the way such people at Yale felt so intellectually superior and so righteous," during an interview with a Texas Monthly reporter in 1994.

In a true showing of the president’s intellectual process, related to the matter of intelligence, the president, went on to say in the same interview, “When I went to college at Michigan, I occasionally played pickup basketball with varsity football players. They obviously felt athletically superior to me. I didn't resent them for it — because they were.”

Yes, my friends, George W Bush is not so smart, and what’s more, he knows it.