Bush? Intellectual? Hah!

The Economist magazine is often a good read, although its big-business readership should be kept in mind when browsing their stories. The current edition includes an article looking at Bush's infatuation with Natan Sharansky, a minister without portfolio in Ariel Sharon's Likud government. The opening para got me hooked:

"INTELLECTUAL" is hardly the first word that springs to mind when you contemplate George Bush. Mr Bush glided through the best education that money can buy without acquiring much in the way of "book learning". At school, he formed a stick-ball team called the Nads (providing him and his pals with a chance to shout "Go Nads"); at Yale, he was famous for doing the alligator, a dance that involved falling on the floor and rolling around; at Harvard Business School, he wore cowboy boots and chewed tobacco, a strutting provocation to the lefty penseurs who dominated Harvard Yard."

I recomment the article, although there was one comment that annoyed me:

... the Michael Moore crowd claim that Mr Bush doesn't really believe any of this claptrap about democracy—a charge that seems absurd, given the blood and treasure America has spent bringing elections to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Why is that so absurd? The "blood" being spilled for Bush's foreign adventures is not his own blood, nor his family's, while the "treasure" being spent belongs to US taxpayers and is going straight into the coffers of Bush's business associates. For example, one of the biggest profiteers in Iraq is Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) - the "Brown" in that name belongs to a wealthy US family with direct links to the Bush-Walker clan.

Still, it's hard to complain about the article's concluding para:

The trouble with Mr Bush's new doctrine is not that he has naively embraced freedom and democracy, but that he hasn't embraced them tightly enough.