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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
George Bush, scholar of ancient Grecian! A White House staffer reveals that his boss has mastered George Eliot, Tocqueville, Aristotle and Wordsworth -- and if you believe that, you can kiss my Posterior Analytics.
Jun 20, 2002 | God bless you, John Bridgeland.
On the morning of June 14, on the way to a college commencement address in Columbus, Ohio, Bridgeland, director of USA Freedom Corps, briefed reporters on a speech President Bush was about to give. It would be, according to Bridgeland, based on the works of George Eliot, Alexis de Tocqueville, Cicero, Adam Smith, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Pope John Paul II, Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
"And we've actually discussed [Aristotle's] 'Nicomachean Ethics' together," Bridgeland said, apparently with a straight face. "Yesterday, he was talking in the Oval Office about how Lincoln had completed or addressed the concern that the founding fathers had when -- Madison in particular, when he rejected Patrick Henry's request to include a declaration of rights in addition, because of the concern that future generations would not remember that there are duties associated with protecting the country we love so much. He made that very case yesterday in the Oval Office."
He did? Wow, we thought. Have we been reading the president wrong all this time? Has the self-described "C student" really been speaking over our heads all this time?
Thanks to Bridgeland we think we have cracked the code! Now the president is finally starting to make sense. (He certainly didn't the other way.) And so we decided to revisit some of Bush's more famous comments -- the ones destined for Bartlett's alongside his predecessor's parsing of "is" -- to see if they could be bolstered by the wise men and women whose intellect he has clearly been struggling to share with us.
So, we should have heard:
"Dreams are nothing but incoherent ideas, occasioned by partial or imperfect sleep."
-- Dr. Benjamin Rush, congressman, signer of the Declaration of Independence
When it came out like:
"Sometimes when I sleep at night I think of [Dr. Seuss's] Hop on Pop."
-- Bush at an education event in Philadelphia, April 2, 2002
We should have heard:
"We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty and the pursuit of happiness ... "
-- Thomas Jefferson, first draft of the Declaration of Independence, June 1776
When it came out like:
"You know, the enemy, when they hit America, didn't understand us. They didn't think we were a nation that could conceivably sacrifice for something greater than ourself, that we were soft, that we were so self-absorbed and so materialistic that we wouldn't defend anything we believed in. My, were they wrong. They missed -- they just were reading the wrong magazine or watching the wrong Springer show."
-- Bush, March 12, 2002
We should have heard:
"May it [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government."
-- Jefferson letter to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826
When it came out like:
"Well, it's an unimaginable honor to be the president during the Fourth of July of this country. It means what these words say, for starters. The great inalienable rights of our country. We're blessed with such values in America. And I -- it's -- I'm a proud man to be the nation based upon such wonderful values."
-- Bush at the Jefferson Memorial, July 2, 2001
We should have heard:
"If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville, from "Democracy in America"
When it came out like:
"Do you have blacks too?"
-- Bush to Brazil's President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, March 2001 (as reported in an April 28, 2002, Estado Sao Pauloan column by Fernando Pedreira, a close friend of President Cardoso)
