If Pigs Had Wings …

Adolf Godwin Hitler, in his book, Mein Kampf, defined the “big lie” as one so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”. It’s a propaganda technique, not terribly effective but often used. Sometimes one can spot a “big” lie by an overly specific account of something. For example, Karl Rove says that George W. Bush read 95 books in 2006, 51 in 2007, and 40 in 2008 (his total has declined – I can only assume he will slip in another 20 or so today).

It seems appropriate that it is Rove spinning this fanciful tale, as he is often referred to as “Bush’s Goebbels”. Rove is a professional liar and not a man to be trusted about anything, even the color of his eyes. He’s endured, for eight years now, the uppity criticism of Bush from the nation’s effete snobs – Bush is maligned as the C-student who is sheltered from bad news. He’s being replaced now by an intellectual, a man who thinks, writes, and above all, reads. Rove is a little testy.

There’s a reason – the critics, effete though they may be, are right. And eight years of the Bush Administration have yielded a major terrorist attack on the country, two unwinnable wars, unimaginable deficits, decrepit federal agencies unable to respond to disaster, and financial collapse. That’s only a partial list of major failures. Add an attack on the Constitution.

That’s the price of not reading.

I know Rove is lying – heck, most of us figured that out right away. But I’ll put up a little evidence. One, many have opined and offered anecdotal evidence that Bush is dyslexic. That doesn’t mean that he is not smart – only that reading is troublesome to him, so that he has to rely on other traits (such as an uncanny ability to read people, if not books) to gather data from around him and process it. Bush relies on staff to verbally summarize reports – due to trust issues, he only likes to hear one side. Hence, disaster.

Winston Churchill was dyslexic. It’s not necessarily debilitating. What undid Bush was not dyslexia, but rather isolation from competing viewpoints. But one thing it certainly means is that Bush did not read books.

Secondly, Bush has himself admitted that he does not read newspapers. As he told Brit Hume in 2003, he started his day by asking Andrew Card “what’s in the newspapers worth worrying about? I glance at the headlines just to kind of (get) a flavor of what’s moving. I rarely read the stories.”

A man who can’t bring himself to read a full newspaper account is unlikely to dive into the tomes that Rove credits him with reading – “David Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter,” Rick Atkinson’s “Day of Battle,” Hugh Thomas’s “Spanish Civil War,” Stephen W. Sears’s “Gettysburg” and David King’s “Vienna 1814.” … U.S. Grant’s “Personal Memoirs”; Jon Meacham’s “American Lion”; James M. McPherson’s “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” and Jacobo Timerman’s “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.”

I challenge anyone reading this to cite an instance in any of Bush’s extemporaneous, unscripted comments, in which he made a historical reference. Any.

Bush might have been an adequate president if he had actually read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals”, as Rove claims he did.” He might not have surrounded himself with yes-persons. His administration is legend for being wrong with extreme clarity of vision, of the tunnel variety. Indeed, if George W. Bush could read a book, he could have spared us all a load of grief.

P.S. New Yorker writer Brendan Gill recalls roaming the Bush Kennebunkport compound one night while staying there looking for a book to read — the only title he could find was “The Fart Book.”

P.P.S. From one of Bush’s Yale classmates: it’s not the substance abuse in Bush’s past that’s disturbing, it’s the lack of substance … Georgie, as we called him, had absolutely no intellectual curiosity about anything. He wasn’t interested in ideas or in books or causes. He didn’t travel; he didn’t read the newspapers; he didn’t watch the news; he didn’t even go to the movies. How anyone got out of Yale without developing some interest in the world besides booze and sports stuns me.