Richard Cohen: Okay, So Bush Reads a Lot - He's Still an Idiot

by: Bill Dupray   posted: 2008-12-30 09:38:00
Viewed 627 times. 7 Comments.

Note: Welcome Conservative Grapevine readers. Thanks to John Hawkins for making Patriot Room today's Blog of the Day.

You can't win with these guys. The smarter-than-everyone-else libs mock George W. Bush for 8 years as a syntax-twisting, moron cowboy. Now we find out that Bush is a prolific reader of histories, biographies, and classics. And Richard Cohen responds with an "Oh yeah, well I am still smarter" column.

In what without a doubt is the most astounding op-ed piece of the year, Karl Rove reveals that his friend and former boss, George W. Bush, has read probably hundreds of books over the course of his presidency. One of them was Albert Camus' "The Stranger," with its unforgettable opening lines: "Mother died today. Or perhaps it was yesterday, I don't know." After reading Rove's Wall Street Journal column, it's clear there's much we all don't know. . . .

In his column, Rove says that Bush read 95 books in 2006 alone. In 2007, he read 51 books and as of last week, he had read 40 in 2008. The numbers are precise because Bush challenged Rove to a contest: who could read the most books. Rove always won, but Bush had the ready excuse that he was, as he put it, busy being "Leader of the Free World." This, though, is not an excuse. As Dwight Eisenhower once told me (I'm not making this up), he had more time as president to dabble in painting than he did in retirement. Such is the virtue of The Bubble.

Think about what Cohen is saying. The President of the United States has read 186 books in the last three years. This is more books than most people will read in their entire lives, and more than anybody that I know has read during that time. The guy was also President and fought two wars, the Democrats, and the media for eight years. But, to Cohen, that's nothing - Bush lives in The Bubble.

Curiously missing from Cohen's piece was the entire list of books he has read in the last three years. I suppose it would be shorter though. He is a busy newspaper columnist, not some layabout like the President of the United States.

And the funny part is that Cohen is a goal-post mover. So when the sheer number of books blows a hole in the Libs' caricature of Bush as an idiot, Cohen retorts that the kinds of books Bush reads still make him a narrow minded idiot. And he then blames the newly-discredited idiot cowboy image on Rove and Bush.

It is awfully late in the day for Rove -- and, presumably, Bush -- to assert the president's intellectual bona fides. Now feeling the hot breath of history, they are dropping the good ol' boy persona and picking up the ol' bifocals one. But the books themselves reveal -- actually, confirm -- something about Bush that maybe Rove did not intend. They are not the reading of a widely read man, but instead the books of a man who seeks -- and sees -- vindication in every page. Bush has always been the captive of fixed ideas. His books just support that.

The list Rove provides is long, but it is narrow. It lacks whole shelves of books on how and why the Iraq war was a mistake, one that metastasized into a debacle. . . .

My hat is off to Bush for the sheer volume and, often, high quality of his reading. But his books reflect a man who is seeking to learn what he already knows. The caricature of Bush as unread died today -- or was it yesterday? But the reality of the intellectually insulated man endures.

I wonder if Richard Cohen has ever read any right wing blogs.

Probably not. Intellectually insulated men only read about stuff they like.

Tags: Richard Cohen, George W. Bush, Books, Karl Rove, MSM, Elitism, Liberals, 

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