A Thing Republicans Do

I first became aware of it while Dan Quayle was vice president. Rather than simply accept that he was not too stellar in the intellect department and draw attention to his other (undoubtedly numerous) fine qualities (honest, nice looking, probably a good father, excellent health, whatever), they had to play him up as possibly the greatest English-speaking brain ever, second only to Isaac Newton, perhaps.

Now, here they do it again, this time for George Bush. Rather than extoll the facts that he's a nice guy, sporty, can really hold his liquor, shoots from the hip (et cetera, I'm sure), Karl Rove has to put out this ridiculous story about a book reading competition between himself and the president. He claims Bush finished 95 books in 2006, 51 in 2007, and only 40 in 2008. While leading "the free world" (the U.S. and Poland, I think), he read Grant's "Personal Memoirs," Camus's "The Stranger," biographies of "Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ and Genghis Khan" and Stephen W. Sears's "Gettysburg," among many others.

We've all seen photos of Bush carrying axes and saws on his ranch. We've seen him with his iPod, on his bike, running, and doing just about everything else. But have we ever seen him with a book in hand? That is, other than this unfortunate image.

Here Frank Rich goes on to say more unkind things about the president including this:

The man who emerges is a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever. It's that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The president who famously couldn’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference in 2004 still can’t.