Sten Gazette

President Bush may not be an intellectual giant, but he isn’t stupid. He has a problem with big words (and some not so big), and he has said some really dumb things, but that doesn’t mean he is less intelligent than the average southern-state governor.

It might be scary to reflect that the Commander-in-Chief of the largest nuclear force in the history of the world is incapable of correctly pronouncing the word nuclear, but that don’t make him stupid, neither. In fact, it might be a deliberate exercise in “cleverness,” since it sounds just right to the majority of his political base, and to the rest of us, somehow, the idea of a “nookyaler weapon” is somehow more frightening than a nuclear one.

Note how easily the expression “weapons of mass destruction” trips off his tongue, most of the time. It’s hard work saying it over and over, so he can probably be forgiven for shortening it to just plain “weapons” once in a while, as in “I thought there were weapons….” But he must have seen some value in the phrase which is, let’s face it, frightening in its sheer weight. The term WMD seems to have been invented specifically for the War on Terror, even though there wasn’t really any need to invent a new term. Immediately after World War II all US military personnel received training for defense against “ABC” attacks. ABC stood for Atomic, Biological, and Chemical.” With the introduction of the hydrogen bomb, Atomic was changed to Nuclear, and the expression NBC was used. So we had NBC weapons, warfare, tactics, defense, etc, almost always in reference to an enemy’s capabilities. Our own weapons of mass destruction were (and for all we know still are) referred to as “Special Weapons.” Ah, what a clever language we have!

But we digress. There have been far more misstatements, errors in fact, grammatical errors, and Freudian slips than we can conceivably attribute to “cleverness.” Unless of course the President is deliberately trying to look stupid. If you ask us, he’s clever, but not that clever. As they useta say in Tennessee, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” There– SG actually uttered the words “shame on me.” Our President was clever enough to spot the trap he was about to fall into, even though his escape was a bit clumsy. Far better to look stupid than to say the words “shame on me” in any context whatsoever.

So he is not an idiot and we must look for some other explanation for his shortcomings or (dare we say it) incompetence. Actually there is an explanation ready to hand, and it can be expressed quite simply– “he’s IGNORANT and LAZY.” Coincidentally, that has the same number of syllables as “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and is about as hard to say. Harder than “he’s a dummy,” anyhow.

The primary dictionary definition of “ignorant” is “lacking in knowledge or education.” Look around you and you will see that it is very easy to graduate from college, or even get an advanced degree, without getting edumacated. The better the school, the more money or prestige it takes, that’s all. Even when it works properly, an education won’t give you all of the knowledge that you will need, but the process of getting one does insure that you know how to think. And that’s something our President doesn’t have to do since he has so many close advisors, including Jesus.

How did he get through four years of college, pilot training in the TANG, and then an MBA, without anything much sinking in? Easy– he’s just dead bone lazy. Nobody was going to flunk him out; everybody was going out of their way to give him an easy ride from the day he was born. He didn’t even flunk out of flying, exactly. A former AF pilot friend (of SG, not Bush!) says it is extremely feasible that his squadron commander took him aside and said something along the lines of “George, we got you your wings, your Daddy’s real proud of you, but nobody’s going to fly with you so please just get lost for a while.” He could even have been told “if you just fail to take your flight physical you’ll automatically be grounded– that way you don’t have to actually quit and nobody has to actually fire your lazy ass.” He could even have been clever enough to figure it out for himself without being told.

You have to worry about a President who asks for re-election but complains that his job is “hard work.” Especially if he has spent more days on vacation than any president in history.

No, the President is not stupid. He’s ignorant and lazy, and if we re-elect him, well… we’re stupid.

“Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us, uh, we just can’t get fooled again.”

–SG

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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 30th, 2004 at 9:18 am and is filed under The President, Politics, Favorites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.