Let's face it - we all know that President Bush is not the sharpest crayon in the box. He is intellectually lazy, actively hostile to differing opinions, and prefers to be spoon-fed by his staff rather than think for himself. But the latest evidence of that brought me to a slack-jawed halt, gaping in horrified amazement as I realized just how embarrassing and dangerous it is that this man is the leader of our nation.
As the New York Times reported, four scholars who recently met with Bush at the White House to discuss the Iraq War said that the President's main concern was not the seemingly endless line of American soldiers coming home in body bags, nor the Shi'a slaughtering the Sunnis, nor the Sunnis slaughtering the Shi'a, nor anything like that.
No, he was most frustrated over the fact "that the new Iraqi government -- and the Iraqi people -- had not shown greater public support for the American mission."
Um...what?
Is Bush really that shallow? Does he really believe that it's all a matter of getting the Iraqi people to say "thank you?" Does he really not understand that thanks to more than three years of incompetence and plunder combined with an increasingly brutal occupation, we are now only slightly more popular than bubonic plague over there?
And if that weren't enough, Peter Galbraith, the former US Ambassador to Croatia, now says that Bush had no idea that Iraq was composed of two different sects of Islam. During a meeting at the White House, three Iraqi-Americans spent some time explaining the Sunni-Shi'a divisions to the President, whereupon Bush said, "I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!"
That was just two months before he ordered the invasion.
With Iraq disintegrating into sectarian civil war and proof all around that the current Iraq strategy (whatever it is) just isn't working, Bush proclaims the only way is to "stay the course" with absolutely no change in anything. And this is the man itching to attack Iran, seeing as how our grand experiment in spreading freedom and democracy proved so effective in Iraq.
The thought of that much power in the hands of someone so ignorant of even the most basic facts should give us all nightmares. God help us all.
