It contradicts (I’m tempted to say busts but it’s one guy’s word) very comprehensively the image of Bush as stupid.

The new George W. Bush Presidential Center is being dedicated this week. This seems like a good time to bust a longstanding myth about our former President, my former boss.

…One of my students asked “How involved was President Bush with what was going on?” I smiled and responded, “What you really mean is, ‘Was President Bush smart enough to understand what was going on,’ right?”

The class went dead silent. Everyone knew that this was the true meaning of the question. Kudos to that student for asking the hard question and for framing it so politely. I had stripped away that decorum and exposed the raw nerve.

I looked hard at the 60 MBA students and said “President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you.”

More silence.

I could tell they were waiting for me to break the tension, laugh, and admit I was joking.

I did not. A few shifted in their seats, then I launched into a longer answer. While it was a while ago, here is an amalgam of that answer and others I have given in similar contexts.

I am not kidding. You are quite an intelligent group. Don’t take it personally, but President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you. Were he a student here today, he would consistently get “HP” (High Pass) grades without having to work hard, and he’d get an “H” (High, the top grade) in any class where he wanted to put in the effort.

For more than six years it was my job to help educate President Bush about complex economic policy issues and to get decisions from him on impossibly hard policy choices. In meetings and in the briefing materials we gave him in advance we covered issues in far more depth than I have been discussing with you this quarter because we needed to do so for him to make decisions.

President Bush is extremely smart by any traditional standard. He’s highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer. It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the advisor would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting.

I use words like briefing and presentation to describe our policy meetings with him, but those are inaccurate. Every meeting was a dialogue, and you had to be ready at all times to be grilled by him and to defend both your analysis and your recommendation. That was scary.

We treat Presidential speeches as if they are written by speechwriters, then handed to the President for delivery. If I could show you one experience from my time working for President Bush, it would be an editing session in the Oval with him and his speechwriters. You think that me cold-calling you is nerve-wracking? Try defending a sentence you inserted into a draft speech, with President Bush pouncing on the slightest weakness in your argument or your word choice.

In addition to his analytical speed, what most impressed me were his memory and his substantive breadth. We would sometimes have to brief him on an issue that we had last discussed with him weeks or even months before. He would remember small facts and arguments from the prior briefing and get impatient with us when we were rehashing things we had told him long ago.

And while my job involved juggling a lot of balls, I only had to worry about economic issues. In addition to all of those, at any given point in time he was making enormous decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan, on hunting al Qaeda and keeping America safe. He was making choices not just on taxes and spending and trade and energy and climate and health care and agriculture and Social Security and Medicare, but also on education and immigration, on crime and justice issues, on environmental policy and social policy and politics. Being able to handle such substantive breadth and depth, on such huge decisions, in parallel, requires not just enormous strength of character but tremendous intellectual power. President Bush has both.

On one particularly thorny policy issue on which his advisors had strong and deep disagreements, over the course of two weeks we (his senior advisors) held a series of three 90-minute meetings with the President. Shortly after the third meeting we asked for his OK to do a fourth. He said, “How about rather than doing another meeting on this, I instead tell you now what each person will say.” He then ran through half a dozen of his advisors by name and precisely detailed each one’s arguments and pointed out their flaws. (Needless to say there was no fourth meeting.)

While I don’t think being able to predict advisers answers is necessarily always hard, it is pretty funny.

The article then goes into reasons why people have come to think Bush is stupid, which basically boil down to:

1) He’s from Texas, not from the “intelligent” states (and as a result has a “funny” accent”.

2) He made a point of presenting himself as a common man, not as an aloof intellectual

The Washington Post has today revealed that the Obama administration has been spying on a Fox news journalist.

The Kim case began in June 2009, when Rosen reported that U.S. intelligence officials were warning that North Korea was likely to respond to United Nations sanctions with more nuclear tests. The CIA had learned the information, Rosen wrote, from sources inside North Korea.

The story was published online the same day that a top-secret report was made available to a small circle within the intelligence community — including Kim, who at the time was a State Department arms expert with security clearance.

So he Mr Rosen got the “inside goss”. Classified yes, but not particularly earth-shattering.

The Administration’s response? They went to court.

Reyes wrote that there was evidence Rosen had broken the law, “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” That fact distinguishes his case from the probe of the AP, in which the news organization is not the likely target.

Using italics for emphasis, Reyes explained how Rosen allegedly used a “covert communications plan” and quoted from an e-mail exchange between Rosen and Kim that seems to describe a secret system for passing along information.

In case you missed it, the US government went to court and told that court that a journalist was in breach of the law, for doing his job.

This is bad for Obama. A lot of news outlets hate Fox for various reasons, but they’re not so blinded that they can’t work out that the administration is completely out of control.

I think there might be a little more of a critical eye on the president from now on.

Well, fair enough you say – if they compromised an ongoing investigation they should be investigated for possible breaches of the law.

Well, here’s the thing: there was no compromise of an investigation. See, the AP was negotiating with the US government on releasing the story. AP was told that the  government  wanted to announce it’s success before AP published the story – a story they’d already been sitting on for days because of the security concerns.

Under these circumstances, it is hard to believe that the AP’s release of the story on Monday threatened national security. In fact, the news organization was explicitly told at that point that it did not. Foiling the ability of the administration to chest-thump is not the same as endangering national security.

Or to put in bluntly: the Obama administration ins harassing journalists for getting in the way of their PR.

When you put this against the various accusations that the Benghazi cover-up was due to the embarrassment it might have caused for the Obama administration (hard to claim a foreign policy success in Libya when your embassy has just been attacked – as opposed to a protest turning violent because of some you-tube video), and the IRS scandal, a very clear picture begins to emerge of a president who has used the levers of power to entrench that power.

Recall with Benghazi, the Hillary Clinton told the families they’d “get the guy” who did it, and promptly arrested Mr Nakoula for his youTube video. That was the guy they said they’d “get” even though he had nothing to do with it. But he was a good scapegoat - easily caught and slaughtered. Seems the guys who actually did the deed aren’t even close to being apprehended (nor is the administration looking keen to get on with that job in spite of it’s promises). Note the PR is taken care of (we “got the guy”) while the security isn’t a priority.

And of course, with the IRS scandal, the Administration called for the head of the IRS. But it turns out, he was leaving anyway. Again, it’s the PR.

Oh, and if you’re not convinced just how bad the IRS issue is, watch this.

Let me bring one more thread in here: this tweet….

TWEET OF THE DAY: “These scandals are so bad that for the first time Obama wants to talk about the economy.”

The joke here is that Obama has created a really bad economy. It’s not recovering. But he was re-elected. Why is that?

It’s not because he had a bang-up second term agenda. In fact, he had no agenda at all until very late in the campaign.

No, he won because he convinced enough of America that Romney was some sort of out-of-touch billionaire who was only out for the rich. That was how he won - smearing his opponent instead of writing policy. In other words, more PR.

And instead of highlighting that, instead of raising alarm bells over how 4 Americans died with assistance within reach, instead of demanding an end to the disasters of Obama’s economic policy, the US media lapped it up and glossed over Benghazi and the economy.

Well congratulations guys, you sucked up to the machine. Now it’s your job to kill it before it kills you.

Watch the video – Piers Morgan is pretty much eating his (very recent) words re: the possibly of an american government being tyrannical. It was only weeks ago that he was scoffing at the idea in relation to the 2nd amendment.

Props to the man for recognizing he was wrong though!

One thing is sure though, Obama has a very serious political problem right now.

First, tax cheats are bad people.

Tax cheats steal from us all. Every dollar they save in tax from these tricks is a dollar we have to pay, borrow, or cut – a dollar we don’t get to spend on schools, hospitals and state houses. The government should make these companies pay their fair share. And if the present government refuses to do so, because they are on the side of the tax cheats, we should elect one that will.

I saw this video at Patterico just now. His point is that the president is using marines to hold his umbrella instead of doing it himself. (Update: Yep)

Well, I’m quite certain I’ve seen Bush have that (in spite of these images) so I think that’s a bit of a beat up.

But I was incredulous at just how bad Obama stumbles around in these comments. He doesn’t even seem to remember who the guy next to him is.

Bush got stick for talking this badly. It seems that Obama’s solution is to never talk off-the-cuff – something that has been noted before.

Obama’s aloof mien and holier-than-thou rhetoric have left him with little reservoir of good will, even among Democrats. And the press, after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to be as ruthless as can be.

This White House’s instinctive petulance, arrogance and defensiveness have all worked to isolate Obama at a time when he most needs a support system. “It feel like they don’t know what they’re here to do,” a former senior Obama administration official said. “When there’s no narrative, stuff like this consumes you.”

When the going got tough for Bush, he stayed loyal to his people and they tended to stay loyal to him.

Obama on the other hand, has always pursued the strategy of throwing “under the bus” anyone who became a political problem. During the first campaign it was his pastor. Today the head of the IRS resigned, while Obama declared that he knew nothing about any of this stuff.

A couple of years ago I read Born Again, Charles Colson’s autobiography. I’d recommend it to any political nut, as it gives a real insight into what a decaying presidency looks like. (Though I strongly suspect that the book paints a slightly less than honest view of Colson’s own actions of the time.)

Time will tell if today’s actions will bring relief to the Administration. I can already see some media reports written by people who clearly are relieved they have an excuse to declare this one “over”. But the ground has certainly shifted, and it will be interesting to see how things develop with at least some of the media now casting a long-overdue critical eye over the administration.

170 houses between 59 MPs is almost three each – and the last those MPs will want is to see the value of their major assets drop. So the sorts of policies which would solve the housing crisis – a capital gains tax, or a government building program – are off the table,

…replaced by weak measures like enabling the private sector to fail for a while longer. Its a perfect example of how the interests of the vast majority of New Zealanders are overridden by those of a tiny wealthy elite who are massively over-represented in Parliament.

In most places in Israel, having children is essentially the law: Observant Israelis feel obliged to observe the mitzvah pru urvu—be fruitful and multiply—from Genesis 1:28. And secular Israelis seem to adhere to the Zionist idea of having kids as part of the demographic war. In Tel Aviv, on the other hand, the issue is more complicated. There are two opposing attitudes when it comes to kids: one anti and one very much pro.

And it’s just my luck that most of my friends belong to the anti-baby side. So for me, in Tel Aviv’s hipster society, having a baby has been basically social suicide.

…

For months before I got pregnant, my friends tried to convince me that having a baby would be a horrible mistake. They emailed me links to academic studies and research showing that children don’t, in fact, make you happy. They told me that wishing to reproduce is narcissistic. I couldn’t always argue with their logic, and in hindsight I must admit that they were right in predicting that once I had a baby, I’d be having more conversations about the different shades and textures of poo than political debates or semiotic analysis of films.

But their ignorance turned into outright denial when I actually did get knocked up. From week to week my belly grew, but my friends around the Friday café table didn’t seem to notice—or, maybe, they didn’t want to notice. At one point I couldn’t take it anymore and decided to blatantly point to my baby bump. The first reaction was a series of blank looks. Then: “What? You got a new shirt?”

***

A few months after my boyfriend and I became parents, we found out we weren’t invited to an afternoon barbecue at a friend’s house. I tried to remember if one of us said anything to annoy him, or if a notorious ex might be on the guest list, thwarting our invitation. After some unsuccessful speculation, I decided to confront my friend, who simply said that he was sorry, but the other guests didn’t want babies at their party. I assumed even baby-haters know that a sleeping infant in a baby-carrier wouldn’t be much of an imposition, but maybe they were afraid I’d be so rude as to breastfeed while people are eating—a vulgar and thoughtless act that might propel someone to lose his spareribs.

As it turns out, my mistake was trying to rationalize the host’s answer, which led to me naively telling him he could have still invited us and told us not to bring the baby. To that he didn’t have an answer; he just mumbled something about not wanting to insult us. That’s when it sank in: It’s not the baby they imagined would cramp the party’s style; it was us. We simply weren’t considered cool anymore. The fear that we would open our mouths to report that a certain someone rolled over for the first time was so great that we had to be kept off the premises altogether.

Children are not optional for a functioning society. Repeat: not optional.

Yet, we’re seeing an increasing trend towards not only seeing them as optional, but undesirable. Partly that’s driven by the misguided idea that more people is “bad for the planet” and the idea that we’re “overpopulated” (even though birth rates are quickly falling below sustainable rates in many countries). 

But there’s also an increasing tread towards people who should be parents simply not wanting to make the sacrifice that children bring. That’s a double loss, because we lose the next generation, and we lose touch with a vital part of life in this generation too – fostering what can only be called selfishness instead.

Obama is now embroiled in three scandals:

1. Benghazi – covered here previously, and thanks to extensive WH cover-ups  a scandal that still has a lot of legs. 
2. It’s just been discovered that the IRS was deliberately targeting conservative/Tea Party groups for heavy auditing, demanding all sorts of information – and then (and this bit is not quite in the MSM yet) leaking it to the press
3. The grabbing of AP’s phone records. This one has even made the news here. And it’s  the one that has turned the above from “this gives the Republicans something to complain about” into “Obama is in trouble”.

And Obama really is in trouble, big trouble.

Let’s start with the Benghazi attack and the issue of what the White House knew and when. This scandal has bubbled below the surface for the past few months, but the embarrassing shift more than a week after the attack from the fiction that the attack started as a demonstration over a YouTube video to a belated acknowledgment that it had been a planned terrorist attack — and that there had been no demonstration at all — had not been forgotten on Capitol Hill.

Three State Department career employees finally came forward to tell Congress last week that no one had even suggested to the State Department that a demonstration had taken place. Gregory Hicks, who was the deputy chief of mission in Libya, told the House Oversight panel that he personally briefed Hillary Clinton during the attack, and that no demonstration had taken place, and that the supposedly catalytic YouTube film about Mohammed was a “non-factor” on the ground. Hicks also said that his “jaw dropped” when he heard Susan Rice tell five different Sunday talk shows that the attack started with a spontaneous demonstration at the consulate, directly contradicting what Libya’s president was telling U.S. news outlets at the same time.

It’s a big problem when you go around telling people you’ll “get the guys who did this” and you then go out and “get” some guy who had nothing to do with it.

And this was the least of the scandals that erupted over the last week. The IRS scandal was entirely new, and at first blush bad enough to drive the Benghazi story out of the headlines. Lois Lerner admitted that her IRS unit overseeing tax-exempt groups had expressly targeted groups with words like “Tea Party,” “Patriot,” and “9/12″ in their names for extra scrutiny. Lerner claimed that this took place only last year among “low-level workers” in the Cincinnati office that handles those applications. Over the weekend, though, it became clear that Lerner left a lot of other information out.

As leaks from an upcoming Inspector General report began on Saturday and rolled through today, a much different picture emerged. The enhanced scrutiny wasn’t applied only on the basis of word searches, but also to any groups critical of the way government was being run. The extra scrutiny didn’t start in June 2012, as Lerner claimed, but in March 2010 — before the midterms, when Tea Party groups campaigned in opposition to the ObamaCare bill that passed (coincidentally?) in that same month.

Using the tax department to persecute the president’s opponents is a massive no-no. 

As bad as that was, the IRS scandal wasn’t even the worst news for Obama. Just when he needed a sympathetic media to help downplay the politicization of the IRS and the rinsing of the Benghazi talking points (which Obama dismissed as “no there there” in a Monday press conference), the Associated Press announced that the Department of Justice had seized two months of phone records of as many as 100 of its reporters and three of its offices. The presumed trigger for this was a leak investigation into a May 2012 story about the CIA operation in Yemen that kept an airliner bomb plot from reaching fruition. Rather than alert the AP that it would subpoena the phone records, the DOJ seized them secretly, claiming that notifying the AP would “pose a substantial threat to the investigation” — even though the APcan’t bury the records of the phone companies involved, even if it were inclined to try.

Suddenly, conservative claims of active intimidation and pressure from the White House looked a lot less conspiratorial to the media. Erik Wemple at the Washington Post called the action “a dagger to the heart of AP‘s news-gathering activity.” What source will trust that their identity will remain anonymous if the government can seize the phone records without warning? TheACLU called it “an unacceptable abuse of power,” which is what conservative groups had called the IRS’s attack on them for most of the past three years.

An incredibly stupid thing to do. 

And these are just the ones making the news. 

Time will tell if the last few days have been a major turning point, or a pretty hefty bump in the road. I’m picking turning point for the public, but the media might just recover themselves in a month or two in time to attach the very notion that we impeach the guy.