From My Pet Goat to “is our children learning?” to the highly suspect presidential reading lists that occasionally “leak out” of the White House, George W. Bush has always been easy sport when it comes to judging his relative bookishness.
No doubt political bloggers and monologue-writers for late-night talk shows are already preparing their fish-in-a-barrel quips in the wake of Bush’s recent admission, to host George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week, that he has “not read one book about me.” He also declared there was nothing he could learn from such books. The context was the recent release of Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, his third book about the Bush administration, and the most critical by far.
Now, unless Jerzy Kozinski was right in Being There, no one becomes the president of the United States without possessing some form of above-average intelligence, whether that be analytical intelligence, or a more raw, on-the-spot kind of political instinct. And really, how much better would it have been for Bush to admit that, yes, he spends most of his free time reading books about himself? Who is he, Conrad Black?
Related links:
Read about Bush’s interview here
Bonus link: Bush on Google
