George Bush, champion of mediocraty

The President of the United States has long shown his disdain for education. In the past seven years he has joked a number of times about how a "C" student (him) is the boss of a large number of PhD's. He did it again today. In his press briefing today he brought up Condolezza Rice's PhD, but reminded the crowd, "just look at who's the president and who's the decider."

I haven't decided yet if this is a point of pride for the President, or if he has a bit of an inferiority complex. Either way, I wish he'd put those "C" student skills to use now and then and read up a bit on current history, or at least have his briefers do it. He later commented that he had heard someone ask about Iraq, "Where's Mandela?" He went on to say that "Mandela is dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandela's."

If I give him the benefit of the doubt (which we've all been doing far too much over the course of his presidency), I think he's asking why there aren't any great resistance leaders like Mandela in Iraq. He then answers his own question by saying that Saddam Hussein killed them all. The other way to look at this statement is that George Bush has made another stupid statement because Mandela is currently alive.

No, I've thought about it some more, and either way it's stupid. The second is the most obvious, but even the first was a dumb thing to say, because there are resistance leaders in Iraq, many who resisted Hussein for decades, and now continue their fight by resisting us. The problem for George Bush is that he doesn't like any of those people. Most of them want to have a government based around priciples that he doesn't like (and in fact scared him enough to cause him to invade Iraq). But even the more moderate ones want a government that doesn't have the United States as a partner.