Deploring Bush

William F. Buckley, Jr. discusses Slate's 10th Anniversary and their homage to the President's malappropisms. What fun to make fun! In the end he says:

Weisberg reproduces a few sentences from Bush that establish the claim of verbal clumsiness. But Weisberg won't settle for that. His thesis is that Bush is incompetent to think and speak, and that he elected to settle with that incompetence because of laziness, since thinking consumes intellectual calories.

Now there is a problem here, and Weisberg ignores it. It is that Bush has confronted in public contests nimble opponents. You would not do combat with the waspish Ann Richards, former governor of Texas, if you could help it. Ms. Richards is one of the sharpest tongues in town (it was she who said that the senior Bush was born with a silver foot in his mouth). Bush not only survived the encounter, he defeated the wasp.

George Bush met in public debate Al Gore, an experienced debater, and walked away with immunity, as he would do four years later in his encounters with John Kerry. Weisberg doesn't take on the question of Bush being accepted at Yale, and achieving enough credits to graduate. It requires skills not generally associated with idiocy to maneuver so as to win the nomination of a national political party, and then an election, not once but twice.George Bush met in public debate Al Gore, an experienced debater, and walked away with immunity, as he would do four years later in his encounters with John Kerry. Weisberg doesn't take on the question of Bush being accepted at Yale, and achieving enough credits to graduate. It requires skills not generally associated with idiocy to maneuver so as to win the nomination of a national political party, and then an election, not once but twice. Weisberg doesn't take on the question of Bush being accepted at Yale, and achieving enough credits to graduate. It requires skills not generally associated with idiocy to maneuver so as to win the nomination of a national political party, and then an election, not once but twice.

Mr. Weisberg's premise -- that to do this does not require intelligence, thoughtful planning and marginal lucidity -- has one wondering, but not about deficiencies in Bush. There manifestly aren't such in Weisberg in the matter of articulateness, so you find yourself playing with the derivations of it all: (1) You can't be stupid and become president; (2) You can be articulate and be stupid.

"You can be articulate and be stupid."