Here and There

I’m still reading Carl Cannon’s cover story from the January/February 2007 issue of The Atlantic. (Cannon discusses the article, on presidential lies, here. No link to story available without subscription.)

The story is broad, and covers executive prevarication, but as I’m wont to do, I felt compelled to get an excerpt of something I just read about George W. Bush posted on this blog:

“The president of the United States is not a fact-checker,” White House communications director Dan Bartlett blurted out at a July 18, 2003, briefing about what the president knew, and when he knew it, regarding British intelligence reports of Saddam Hussein’s agents prowling around Africa in search of enriched uranium.

No one expects him to be. What they do expect is that a president who takes the nation to war knows what he’s talking about when he enumerates the reasons for that war. Which raises the central question about George W. Bush’s tenure in the White House: Even giving him the benefit of the doubt on honesty, why doesn’t the nation’s first-ever M.B.A. president demonstrate a better command of the facts?

I’ve never been of the camp that believes Bush is dumb. But I also wouldn’t get caught up in the semantics of whether he’s a liar or not. As Cannon’s article diligently points, some form of lying could be built-in to the job of “running the country.”

My contention has always been that Bush suffers a spot of ADD, a heavy dose of paternalistic obliviousness, a dangerous degree of aloofness. He’s someone better suited to coach the girl’s varsity basketball team, say, or I don’t know, just not “run” anything.

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