Webloggin » Hah!

The following story, which astute political analyst Richard Baehr brought to my attention, is a real “hah!” story. And by “hah!” I mean a triumphant exclamation. Here’s the story:

Two of Washington’s best-informed men confirmed it so it must be true. President Bush and his consigliere Karl Rove bet on who had read the most books in a year. Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told friends Rove won with 117 books and Bush was a close second with 104 books.

Unhappy over his loss to his close confidant, Bush asked for a recount — in words. And the president won by 1.7 percent. The story is not apocryphal. In fact, none other than McConnell’s predecessor as the nation’s top spymaster, John Negroponte, now deputy secretary of state, confirmed it. The president, he explained, reads two to three books a week and does not watch television. Most of them are history and biographies of famous statesmen (and three stateswomen who took their countries to war, namely Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, Israel’s Golda Meir and India’s Indira Gandhi).

Bush identifies with George Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Truman and on the other side of the pond, Winston Churchill, all men of courage who did what was right when it was most difficult. From the order to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed instantly 150,000 Japanese to avoid the loss of an estimated 1 million American lives in an invasion of Japan; to the recognition of the state of Israel against the advice of World War II’s most prestigious military leader, Secretary of State George C. Marshall; to the decision to repel North Korea’s invasion of South Korea; to the firing of the immensely popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur for disobeying the president; to Ronald Reagan’s defeat of the evil Soviet Empire, Mr. Bush sees his decision to invade Iraq in the same historical league.

President Bush showed a recent visitor a portrait of Lincoln to talk about the tremendous odds that president encountered in his decision to go to civil war to free the slaves. Bush had done something roughly comparable in his decision to free 26 million Iraqi slaves from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny.

Bush’s model for resisting and defeating Islamist extremism’s global campaign to restore the caliphate and destroy Christendom is Churchill. Isolated in the 1930s on the back benches of parliament, his clarion calls for backbone against Hitler’s Europewide ambitions went unheeded until World War II broke out Sept. 1, 1939 — and then still didn’t get the draft to lead until the Nazi blitzkrieg in May 1940.

Read the rest here.

I’m impressed. To have the kind of demanding job the President has, and still to manage to read 104 books in a year is quite a feat. I read more books than that, but I’ll be the first to admit both that I have a much less onerous job and that I interlard my serious books with frivolous reading that I would never boast about (although I do blog about it).

In any event, I love the story primarily because it highlights what I’ve suspected all along, and what the media so assiduously obscures — namely, that the President is no fool. You can giggle at his malapropisms, but you should never mistake a bumbling tongue for a stupid or ill-informed brain. This is a man who knows his history, and who thinks about things. Sadly, the endless jokes about Bush’s stupidity seep much more deeply into the popular consciousness (witness Mr. Bookworm’s comment this morning), than do the actual facts about the man’s knowledge and analytical abilities.

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