Subject: Re: AOC’s thoughts on Taiwan
You may not recall, but there was a period back on Old Fool where I found myself defending W's intelligence against his litany of misstatements and ungrammatical sentence fragments - for that same reason.

Well OK, but I think you picked the wrong example. He had malapropisms galore, true, but he was also not smart. Maybe not as dumb as Dan Quayle, but that’s a really low bar. He rode in on Daddy’s coattails (name recognition is a valuable tool) and the electorate fatigue of Democratic scandal (the oval office hummer), not because he was some shining light of intellect.

He’s the guy who sat frozen in front of a kindergarten class because he didn[t want to disturb them when told “the US is under attack.” He’s the guy who thought it would be peachy to invade Iraq, whichn everyone in the administration knew had nothing to do with 9/11. He’s the one who approved disbanding the Iraq army, sending 250,000 angry young muslim men home, unemployed, and with guns.

He’s the one who oversaw the collapse of the housing market, and while I don’t attribute that to him, it surely was a result of the policies he and his buddies encouraged. And then, at the critical moment, he did … nothing. We all remember John McCain rushing back to the White House for the emergency meeting, who had the same response to the crisis, best summed up as “Anybody got any ideas?”

I won't even get into “Heck of a job Brownie” or “ignoring the ‘flashing red’ signs which culminated in jet aircraft flying into American buildings. So yes, there’s the “going to war over false pretenses”, there’s “mission accomplished”, there’s the failure of post-war planning for Iraq (and no, it wasn’t even a plan gone bad, it was no plan at all. Even a light reading of history - heck, his own father’s history - would have told him that some kind of plan would be a good idea.)

There’s the Valerie Plame affair, which he could have snuffed out in a minute, the Abu Ghraib scandal and so much more.

And listen, I’m not blaming him for every single thing some underling did which made headlines. Every presidency has at least a couple of those. I’m saying an intelligent guy would try to get ahead of those, would have a formed response, would try to improve things instead of just sitting there reading “My Pet Goat” (euphemism for the reactions to almost everything, including all of the above, which happened on his watch.) OF COURSE Dick Cheney stepped into the vacuum, the vacuum was enormous and too big to be ignored. A more competent CEO wouldn’t have taken 7 years out of an 8 year term to sideline him, for instance.