Dumb Bush quote of the day--maybe year (from Daily Show)

[tristano's ghost]

Gawd almighty, how could anybody on this board have voted for this man? Via Tom Tomorrow:

Moron in Chief
Last night's Daily Show, a rerun from a few weeks back, contained a Bush quote from September 23 that I missed at the time. He's in Texas with Chertoff, discussing Hurricane Rita:

The thing I'm gonna do is, observe the relationship between the state and local government...I'm gonna watch that relationship, it's an important relationship and I need to understand how it works better.

Did I mention he said this in Texas? Where, as Jon Stewart of course pointed out, he was once governor?

My wife and I were discussing this, trying to think of a single Democratic presidential candidate who was as obviously--what's the word I want?--stupid as George W. Bush, and we just couldn't. I have disagreed strongly with plenty of Democratic candidates, but I can't think of one as predictably cringeworthy as GWB.

Man, it's not just the National Guard W. was AWOL from.

[Dr Dave]

Better still, he was lying. Watching state/federal relationships implies a certain ration of intellectual curiosity. A ration which the Dear Leader does not have. Damn, what DOES he think about? Anything?

[patricia]

Originally Posted by Dr Dave

Damn, what DOES he think about? Anything?

I don't think that there is anything at all going on in his head. He has no ability for abstract thought, or any kind of complex reasoning. I can't help thinking, as I watch his darting eyes and his nervous smirk that he is waiting to be told what he thinks. It is more than frightening.

[Gary Sisco]

What he needs to understand would take several lifetimes, for him, assuming he skips the coke and alcohol in each one.

[Paul B]

Monte? Gordon?

Any comment on the intelligence of your great leader?

[clinthopson]

Originally Posted by patricia

I don't think that there is anything at all going on in his head.

patricia, wrong! Shrub's head is full of delusions.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by clinthopson

patricia, wrong! Shrub's head is full of delusions.

I think that, much like I would be in his position right now, he has a calendar on which he is counting the days until he can hand this off to somebody else. It's clearly not fun for him anymore. But, President Bush has three more years and change to go.
Who knows how much damage he can do between now and then? He's not going to magically grow leadership qualities.
I think that he could have pulled off being President, even with his limitations and they are legion, if he had had different people in his inner circle, with no grandiouse agendas of their own.
I think that George W Bush just wanted to finally succeed at something, but this latest attempt is not working out quite the way he had hoped.
The difference to me is that up until now his failures didn't make any difference to regular people. Now it does. Scary stuff.
It's Parkinson's Law in action. He has been promoted to his level of incompetence.

[Monte Smith]

Originally Posted by Paul B

Any comment...?

Sure. That quote seems pretty weak to be the dumb quote of the day. Surely the President could have meant that he wanted to observe the Louisiana and New Orleans governments particularly, something that his experience in Texas would not have made him intimately familiar with. But even if he didn't mean this, even if the gloss that John Stewart puts on the statement is valid--that President Bush has no recollection of ever being governor of anything--still I bet that that interpretation of the comment wouldn't rate as the dumb quote of the day. Surely our President said something stupider on September 23. I mean, I don't have any examples on hand--I didn't do research--but I'm guessing other and stupider words poured from the Leader of the Free World's gaffe-prone piehole during the course of his duties on 9/23/05. We're talking about George W. Bush, after all. For all I know, the President may have said something stupider both directly before and immediately after saying this very quote. He's got the gift.

[Monte Smith]

Originally Posted by patricia

It's Parkinson's Law in action. He has been promoted to his level of incompetence.

I think you mean the Peter Principle. Parkinson's Law states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." You see, the President is not the only one who is gaffe-prone.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by Monte Smith

I think you mean the Peter Principle. Parkinson's Law states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." You see, the President is not the only one who is gaffe-prone.

You're right, Monte. I did mean the Peter Principle. I have made at least a dozen mistakes in my life and this made up the baker's dozen.
As you know, the Peter Principle was developed years ago by Laurence Peter, who is a Canadian, by the way, using [gasp] civil servants. He wondered why someone who was doing a bang-up job at their present position was rewarded by promoting him/her to the next level, which turned out to be way past their abilities. Why not just give them a raise and keep them where they are within their ability?
Wouldn't it be interesting if people, such as the President, were doing the job indicated by results of an aptitude test of some kind? Why train them on the job?

[Ron Thorne]

With all due respect, this quote (post #1) doesn't even come close to being the dumbest, goofiest, lamest or wackiest quote attributable to Dubya.

How about this recent one:

"I want to thank the President and the CEO of Constellation Energy, Mayo Shattuck. That's a pretty cool first name, isn't it, Mayo. Pass the Mayo."

Or this one:

"Part of the strategy is to call free nations together to form a coalition, to share information and to find people before they hurt."

Everyone has their favorites, and one of our sons has catalogued them (and more) on his popular website, DubyaSpeak.com. You can spend hours there, pouring over the amazing utterances of our beloved "leader".



Enjoy.

[Monte Smith]

Originally Posted by patricia

Wouldn't it be interesting if people, such as the President, were doing the job indicated by results of an aptitude test of some kind?

Taking it strictly as a hypothetical, and not applying it to our President, I consider that a world in which persons performed only the jobs indicated to them by aptitude tests would be fucked up. Not fucked up in the same way as the real existing world is, qualitatively, but nevertheless completely fucked up. I mean they'd probably assign jobs for you and I, patricia, where we were sitting behind computers all day. Oh wait. Anyway, I am not advocating a Monte Principle: that the amount of fucked-upness in any given alternate social order is constant. I think that has been disproven both in history and our own time.

[Pete C]

Originally Posted by patricia

Wouldn't it be interesting if people, such as the President, were doing the job indicated by results of an aptitude test of some kind?

Is your faith in aptitude tests as strong as your faith in universal manners?

[Lazaro Vega]

For all of this the "idea" he's bringing up is bigger than just this Presidency -- throwing all the responsibility at the state's while undermining their economic viability to handle the problems is an on-going plank of the Republicans. What is the biggest shame is that America elected people to government who don't believe in governing. A government that doesn't govern equals Katrina's aftermath, corporate corruption, lack of Bird Flu preventative measures, crony-ism for Federal Judgeships, and on and on and on....Unfortunately there's no opposition party in America. None. The Dems aren't doing anything to knock this guy out. He's not even on the ropes, he's on the mat crawling on all fours and the Dems can't propose anything like real answers that would push him all the way to the mat then out of the ring. Living in a "lesser of two evils world" with government by, for and of the special interests, to quote Molly, and the Dems aren't offering anything. They're not even coming out en masse against the war, while the country is. So, the point is, we're seeing the results of 25 years of political dominance of suppy side economics coming to it's ugly, rotten fruition and there's no one putting forward a viable alternative or "real" workable, understandable solution. You can't have democracy with 2 percent of the population controlling 98 percent of the country's wealth. You can have a form of economic/social/political facism, but democracy....nope.....

[frank m]

Sad ain't it? I can''t think of a single democrat who I feel could swing it. And I'm a lifetime democrat.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by Pete C

Is your faith in aptitude tests as strong as your faith in universal manners?

I would say that they are about equal. Why do you ask?
I was being facetious.
Don't you ever wonder how President Bush would fare in the real world?
It seems to me that for somebody who has been around politicians and government all his adult life, he has been curiously unaffected by events going on around him.

[Monte Smith]

Originally Posted by patricia

Don't you ever wonder how President Bush would fare in the real world?

That's a funny question.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by Monte Smith

That's a funny question.

Do you mean that that has never occurred to you?

[Pete C]

If it ain't the real world he's fucking with a lot of imaginary people.

[patricia]

That's the tragedy. These are real people.

[Monte Smith]

Originally Posted by Pete C

If it ain't the real world he's fucking with a lot of imaginary people.

Exactly. What patricia means by the "real world" is an unreal hypothesis. I understand what she is saying--what if George W. faced the world with his given talents and no extraordinary connections. But those talents and those connections are both part of the actual world.

[Dr Dave]

I would like to personally take this opportunity to applaud Monte for being a good sport regarding the various deficiencies of The Dear Leader. I would like also to predict that one day a man (or woman) of the stature of Theodore Roosevelt will appear on the national scene, and that he (or she) will pluck Monte from his present, and grossly undeserved, national obscurity, to charge him with the quotidian polishing of the Presidential image. At which time I will remind Monte of this very prediction, and let him know that as far as I'm concerned, cronyism is no sin, as long as it involves a cushy sinecure for me.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by Monte Smith

Exactly. What patricia means by the "real world" is an unreal hypothesis. I understand what she is saying--what if George W. faced the world with his given talents and no extraordinary connections. But those talents and those connections are both part of the actual world.

Unfortunately you're right and I'm not unmindful of that. That's the way of the world and we all take advantage of contacts to advance in our jobs if we can.
But, usually connections just get you a job for which you might otherwise have not been the best candidate. Almost never do thousands of people die because of your incompetence. The worst that can happen is that the company fails, or loses millions of dollars, because you made a series of dumb moves. If that happens you are gently moved out and given a large severance package. But President Bush's dumb decisions have cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives. That puts him in a whole different catagory.

[Ron Thorne]

And now, back to the thread topic -- dumb Bush quotes. Howzabout these recent gems?

"I think that steroids ought to be banned from baseball." - White House, 10/04/2005

"I had an interesting opportunity to go see some research and development being done on solar energy. I'm convinced, someday in the relative near future we'll be able to have units on our houses that will be able to power electronics within our houses, and hopefully, with excess energy, be able to feed them back in the system. That's possible. We're not there yet, but it's coming." - White House, 10/04/2005

[patricia]

Well, Ron, Bush has said, more than once that he doesn't read newspapers, or watch television.
I guess he doesn't pay any attention to what's going on around him at all. Ignorance is not just bliss, but a way of life for George W Bush. And, to make it worse, he seems smugly proud of being totally uninformed. Whew.