COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

Slate's Jacob Weisberg severely overstates his case on today's Slate:

The question I am most frequently asked about Bushisms is, "Do you really think the president of the United States is dumb?"

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.

If Bush isn't exactly the moron he sounds, his synaptic misfirings offer a plausible proxy for the idiocy of his presidency.

Now I hate to cut my own throat with a guy I might be querying to let me write articles, soon, but Weisberg is falling into a common media trap. Because Weisberg is a writer and editor, and surrounds himself with other writers and editors, he comes to have an exaggerated notion of the correlation of volcabulary size with mental acuity.

But as anyone who's worked and succeeded in other fields--and as ANY real manager can tell you, sometimes inarticulateness can mask greatness.


Yes, Bush has been prone to verbal gaffes. Some of them quite entertaining. But caught up in the narcissistic assumption that mastery or non-mastery of grammar somehow defines the man, pundits like Weisberg have been homing in on them for years, like heatseeking missiles chasing down so much chaffe.

And the President zooms away untouched, and it just leaves this guy baffled.

(Meanwhile, he can somehow ignore statements like "I was for the amendment before I voted against it," which is at once grammatically flawless as morally and politically craven. Somehow Bush's misstatements are a proxy for his Presidency, but Kerry's reflect, oh, I don't know--nuance.


Now writers--who by and large have next to zero real responsibilities. I mean, real responsibilities, say, for peoples' lives--are vulnerable to forgetting that the ability to boil a set of competing values and priorities down to its core--and quickly--and then making a sound and timely decision, is a form of intelligence quite different from trying to articulate those ideas in linear form.

I do know many highly articulate people who can't make a decision to save their lives.

They make good advisors. And they can make fine journalists. But they make lousy leaders.

But as we all know, the inarticulate can be shrewd, the fluent fatuous.

The author pays pro-forma lip service to the idea I just mentioned. But there's nothing in the article that suggests he's internalized that knowledge. Of course, if you're gifted in verbal intelligence and deficient elsewhere, it's perfectly possible to have obtained intellectual knowledge without it really meaning anything, in the same way that someone can memorize the chord changes to "All the Things You Are" and still not be able to play the damn tune!

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.

Here he undercuts his whole 'Bush is stupid' argument--the argument he's really trying to make all along, although without the cojones to admit to it.

Either his lingustic deficit indicates a lack of mental capacity or it does not. Which is it? If it does, then why bring up the idea? If not, then what's the point of the article?

What's more, calling the president a cretin absolves him of responsibility.

Admit it, Weisberg. You'd like to call the president a cretin. Except that you still want to be able to throw eggs at him. So you want him to have moral culpability.

Here's an idea for you: The President actually functions on levels you just aren't equipped to understand. It's beyond you. And beyond a lot of other people, too. Which is why you underestimated him when he beat Anne Richards, and you underestimated him when he won reelection to the governorship by a landslide. And you understimated him when he went head to head against Gore and mopped the floor with him in two of the three debates. You had a fit when the poll results proved it.

And you underestimated him when he won the election. And you underestimated him when he steered his tax cuts through a bitterly divided Senate. And you underestimated him on Sept. 11th 2001 and all through the Afghanistan War.

And every time he's proven the handwringers wrong, and reduced them to irrelevancy.

Now, some people might take a hint and figure out that yes, indeed, there's some substance to this man. After all, lightweights tend not to become President.

So in the face of all the lessons of the last ten years of political history, who's the ignorant one here?

Finally, elitist condescension, however merited, helps cement Bush's bond to the masses.

Actually, those of us who know, you know, real Americans actually prefer the term "wretched refuse," thankyouverymuch. Or, more simply, "Americans.

If it's not too much trouble for a man of letters.

What, precisely, is your problem with Americans, anyway? Can you see clearly, looking down your nose like that? Don't strain yourself. Your eyes will get stuck looking beneath your glasses at us like that. Ask your Mom.

By the way: If I were to write an article arguing that inarticulateness reflects stupidity, I would first learn how to spell words like "numbskull" before I tried to use them to insult other people.

That's just the way we did things out in the Red states.

Quaint, isn't it?

What makes mocking this president fair as well as funny is that Bush is, or at least once was, capable of learning, reading, and thinking. We know he has discipline and can work hard (at least when the goal is reducing his time for a three-mile run). Instead he chose to coast, for most of his life, on name, charm, good looks, and the easy access to capital afforded by family connections.

And so we see the full pettiness of Weisberg's argument come into view. Without apparent irony, I might add, given the family connections of the Democratic nominee.

Does Weisberg really mean to argue that this President is incapable of reading, learning, and thinking?

Is Weisberg really that stupid?

I'd like to see him go to a Special Education convention and use language like that.

I don't know. Calling Weisberg "stupid" absolves him of responsibility for his actions.

So I'll settle for the term "arrogance."

Though he sometimes carries books for show, he either does not read them or doesn't absorb anything from them.

I don't know about that. But I do know that you don't know either. But that doesn't stop you from making the point, does it?

Consider the testimony of several who know him well.

Richard Perle, foreign policy adviser: "The first time I met Bush 43 … two things became clear. One, he didn't know very much. The other was that he had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much."

To me, that is a sign of remarkable intelligence. Of course, I've been in a position of supervising a multidisciplinary team when I am not the subject matter expert on every specialty within the organization.

Apparently, Weisberg never has.

There's an old story--perhaps apocryphal--about a group of academics who had a low opinion of Ford's intelligence, because he had little formal education. They came to his office and tried to stump him with arcana. "Why should I clutter my mind with minutiae," Ford asked, "when I can pick up the phone and call someone who does know, and get the answer to any question I need within minutes?"

Ford knew his limitations, and how to leverage the skills of others. He also knew that his function in life was not to be the clearinghouse of information, but to boil issues down to their critical singularities, and make a sound and timely decision in such a way that his supervisors could communicate it to the factory floor and see that it was implemented.

This is a different heierarchy than you see in the journalism world. But the educated journalists in high-status jobs are frequently out earned by the people who drive the ink trucks.

And most editors are out-earned by any truck-driving yahoo who makes a portojohn business run.

Yeah, we're dumb like foxes.

Laura Bush, spouse: "George is not an overly introspective person. He has good instincts, and he goes with them. He doesn't need to evaluate and reevaluate a decision. He doesn't try to overthink. He likes action."

Again, I consider this a sign of high intelligence--not low. It's the intelligence that allows the President to focus on things that matter and not on things that don't. And for the most part, it allows his organization to do so, too. Which is why Bush's White House functioned very well for the first two years, while Clinton's romper-room administration was an overworked, unfocused disaster until they brought in David Gergen for some adult supervision.

A second, more damning aspect of Bush's mind-set is that he doesn't want to know anything in detail, however important.

Anyone who's ever had to make a decision quickly also has had to say to a staff "don't waste my time. Get to the nut of it."

When I was commanding a company, I had other people who's job it was to mind the minutiae so I could concentrate on readiness and training. When I was an XO, the 1rst Sergeant and I minded the minutiae specifically so the commander wouldn't have to worry about them.

It safeguards the President's time, and it disciplines the staff. They cannot get to the nut of an issue without first knowing the details.

So, no...even if we take Weisberg's idea at face value, it doesn't reflect a lack of candlepower. People who work through the efforts of others, such as Executives and presidents just use it differently than people who live off of their own efforts, such as writers and journalists.

Weisberg might be too intelligent to comprehend this. But the idea's pretty clear to this dumb grunt.

Closely related to this aggressive ignorance is a third feature of Bush's mentality: laziness.

By the way--before I started accusing others of aggressive ignorance I would probably learn about some ideas like Dr. Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences.

You, know, so as not to appear ignorant.

Again, this is a lifelong trait. Bush's college grades were mostly Cs (including a 73 in Introduction to the American Political System).

Wow--Weisberg thinks the President's grades in college are actually relevant. By the same token, he must think his own grades in college must be relevant, too. Too bad nobody else does.

Did Weisberg ever say anything about the fact that Bush got better grades in college than Gore? Did Weisberg ever mention Gore flunking out of divinity school?

No. Weisberg apparently lacks a sort of intelligence that enables him to clearly analyze both sides of the aisle.

A fourth and final quality of Bush's mind is that it does not think.

An amazingly hubristic and ignorant assertion.

By leaping to conclusions based on what he "believes," Bush avoids contemplating even the most obvious basic contradictions

Silly me--but my own beliefs figure into my decision making, too. And so do a number of other peoples. I guess that's a "Red state" thing. Am I stupid?

Go on, you can say it.

between his policy of tax cuts and reducing the deficit

Well, there is that little matter of tax cuts being stimulative, and then there's the whole Keanesian economics theory thing in general. You know--government spending acting as a counterweight to the economic cycle, and the fact that we had a recession building up in 2000 and in full steam by 2001.

Of course, actually bringing up complexities is probably a stupid thing to do.

between his call for a humble foreign policy based on alliances and his unilateral assertion of American power

The assertion that the US asserted its power unilaterally is a demonstrable and execrable lie, and should be confronted wherever it arises.

Weisberg cheapens the sacrifices of all the good men and women of Spain, Italy, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Japan, the United Kingdom, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Poland, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, and everyone else who actually has troops on the ground in Iraq. And in Afghanistan, for that matter.

Hmmm..I'm beginning to question whether I'm really any dumber than Weisberg.

between his support for in-vitro fertilization (which destroys embryos) and his opposition to fetal stem-cell research (because it destroys embryos).

Such is the nature of political compromise, Mr. Weisberg. People who have actual responsibilities have to make them from time to time. Of course, you're probably not dumb enough to realise that. We'll do our best to work with you.

Why would someone capable of being smart choose to be stupid? To understand, you have to look at W.'s relationship with father.

Thank you, professor Freud. I'm sure you're more than qualified to conduct the psychoanalysis. I'm also sure you're intelligent enough to think your analysis matters. The rest of us dumbasses pretty much call it 'psychobabble.'

Did you really dumb enough to stoop to this level of silliness?

Bush's old answer to hard questions was, "I don't know and, who cares." His new answer was, "Wait a second while I check with Jesus."

I guess you are. And arrogant enough to throw bigotry in with it.

Dubya polished off his old man's greatest enemy, Saddam, but only by lampooning 41's accomplishment of coalition-building in the first Gulf War.

Those of us actually stupid enough to know the details know that Dubya built a 49-nation coalition of his own.

A more knowledgeable and engaged president might have questioned the quality of the evidence about Iraq's supposed weapons programs.

A more knowledgable and engaged President like Clinton?

He was not born stupid. He chose stupidity. Bush may look like a well-meaning dolt. On consideration, he's something far more dangerous: a dedicated fool.

Hey, if he's a fool who knows when to make a decision, if he's a fool dedicated to economic growth and stimulative economic policy in the middle of a recession, if he's a fool with the political skills to build a 49 nation coaltion despite the best efforts of France and Russia to sabotage him, if he's a fool who has the intelligence to ask questions when he doesn't know the answers he needs to make a decision, if he's a fool who can steer a reasonable compromise on the volatile stem-cell debate, if he's a fool who prays before he makes a decision, and if he's a fool who can make educated people like you tear their hair out, then we need more fools like him, and this fool may well vote for him come November.

Weisberg, you should be so stupid.

Splash, out

Jason