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In his new book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Frank Rich dismisses the popular notion that George W. Bush is stupid, and makes a penetrating observation:

[T]here was plenty of evidence to suggest that Bush was no dunce. His mediocre grades at Yale — which he tried to keep private — were indistinguishable from those of the showily wonky Gore at Harvard. The problem with Bush was not that he was stupid but that he thought everyone else was stupid.

There’s a lot of that going around.

Rich continues:

He believed he could sell anything if he repeated the pitch often enough (and often verbatim).

On left-wing blogs, conservatives and Republicans are idiots. On right-wing blogs, liberals and Democrats are morons. On both sides, everyone in the middle is uninformed or ill-informed or just plain dense — otherwise, they would agree with me.

“I harangue and I harangue, but do you listen?”

Homer Simpson expressed the mindset admirably, explaining why something had been done the way it was: “Because they’re stupid, that’s why. That’s why everybody does everything!”

Oh, I’m guilty, too. As a Macintosh zealot, I am morally obligated to pity those poor souls who use Microsoft Windows. It’s not their fault, really — they just don’t know any better. For their part, Windows users seem to view Mac people with scorn, more than pity.

The belief that everyone else is stupid seems deeply ingrained. I can’t tell whether it’s a trait of human nature, of the American character, or just of the particular bunch of jerks I keep running into.

What’s the benefit of recognizing stupidity in others? It’s a great time-saver. You don’t have to waste your time listening to morons or explaining your own views to idiots.

The problem is that the only way to determine whether someone is worth listening to is to listen to him for a while. It seems, increasingly, that we’ve cut out that step. We never listen, so we never learn. That makes us ineducable.

“Ineducable.” Yeah, it’s a big word. I’m not stupid. I’m just incapable of learning anything, which is completely different.

It’s official — I’m a cynic.

Gasoline prices around here have fallen more than a dollar from their all-time highs only a few weeks ago. But am I happy? No.

The oil companies know they’ve never had better friends in Washington than the Bush Administration and current Republican leadership in Congress. These politicians have swept aside environmental and consumer protections, have engineered massive giveaways of drilling rights on government land, and have peppered the tax code with countless loopholes and exemptions, all for the benefit of Big Oil.

The oil companies have been cashing in big time, but recently their giddy excess has become a burden to their friends in Washington. If the Democrats win control of Congress, might the good times be over?

There are countless forces affecting gas prices. That helps make it difficult to prove manipulation. But I feel a psychic prediction coming on: gas prices will stay low until election day, but will be significantly higher three weeks after election day than they were on election day.

We’ll see.

I’m cynical when I read this:

According to two conservative websites, White House political strategist Karl Rove has been promising GOP insiders that there will be an “October surprise” before the midterm elections.

followed by this leak:

French and U.S. officials discounted a report Saturday in a French newspaper indicating that Osama bin Laden had died of typhoid last month in a remote area of Pakistan.

It doesn’t help that the French newspaper is called L’Est Republicain.

Hey, maybe Pakistan’s recent truce with Taliban-allied militants is actually part of an elaborate ruse calculated to let Bush pull bin Laden out of a hat just before the November elections. Maybe the long trail of stumbles and fumbles has all been a ruse to lull bin Laden and al Zawahiri into a false sense of security. Gosh, I hope so.

Gary Hart suggests a different October surprise:

It should come as no surprise if the Bush Administration undertakes a preemptive war against Iran sometime before the November election.

Were these more normal times, this would be a stunning possibility, quickly dismissed by thoughtful people as dangerous, unprovoked, and out of keeping with our national character. But we do not live in normal times.

I am among those who believe that Karl Rove bugged his own office in a 1986 campaign and blamed it on the Democrats. There’s really almost nothing he wouldn’t do to win an election.

I hope his “October surprise” is more creative than launching a new war — that’s been done to death.

Hey — I just said “I hope“. Maybe I’m not a total cynic after all.

Before we invaded Iraq, Colin Powell said, “You break it, you buy it.” How badly have we broken it?

The civilian death toll is now running at roughly 100 a day, with many of the victims gruesomely tortured with power tools or acid. Over the summer, more Iraqi civilians died violent deaths each month than the number of Americans lost to terrorism on Sept. 11. Meanwhile, the electricity remains off, oil production depressed, unemployment pervasive and basic services hard to find.

…

Growing violence, not growing democracy, is the dominant feature of Iraqi life. Every Iraqi knows this. Americans need to know it too.

…

Acknowledging the hard facts of today’s Iraq must be more than a political talking point for the president’s opponents. It is the only possible beginning to a serious national discussion about what kind of American policy has the best chance of retrieving whatever can still be retrieved in Iraq and minimizing the damage to wider American interests.

“A serious national discussion” might seem fruitless so long as Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are in charge. But someday they will be gone, and it will become possible to try to fix what they’ve broken, and partisan platitudes, from either side, will not be up to the task.

Shamefully, we have never taken this war very seriously. That must end.

We’ve been worried about Iran getting nuclear weapons. We know Pakistan already has nukes. We know that al Qaeda and Taliban fighters found refuge in remote areas of Pakistan after the U.S. attacked Afghanistan. So this is pretty scary:

Panicky rumors of a coup swept through Pakistan on Sunday after a power outage interrupted national television broadcasts and later plunged much of the country into darkness.

With the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, away on an extended trip to the United States and Canada at a time of regional tensions and growing insurgency in neighboring Afghanistan, many Pakistanis speculated that he had been overthrown in absentia.

The chairman of the national power administration, Tariq Hamid, said at a 10 p.m. news conference in Lahore that the outage was caused by technical problems and that no sabotage had been involved.

The downside of embedding videos from YouTube: when YouTube is having trouble, I’m having trouble, too.

Right after the terror attacks in 2001, even the folks poking fun at George W. Bush believed that he would rise to confront history’s challenge. It’s five years later, and boy, were we ever wrong!

The Bush administration continues to get good poll numbers on the War on Terror.

Oh, sure, Bush’s tax policies have looted the treasury for the benefit of the very rich. Sure, he’s filled important government jobs with incompetent cronies. Sure, he’s turned budget surpluses into the biggest deficits in history, and saddled our children and grandchildren with trillions of dollars of new debt. Sure, his Medicare changes were a nightmare of complexity and confusion. Sure, he invaded a country that never attacked us, based on false and falsified intelligence. Sure, he turned his back on the people of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck.

But he’s doing a fine job fighting terror, right?

That’s not what U.S. intelligence agencies are saying:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

…

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,” it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

…

In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.

But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture about the trends in global terrorism.

…

[T]he Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of “D+” to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.”

“The Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse.” Worse! Not “little improved,” but “worse”. For that, a grade of “D+”?

The War on Terror is their strong suit, their best thing, and they’re doing more harm than good.

I say flunk ’em.

Once again, Bob Geiger has a fresh batch of political cartoons.

Today is the start of Banned Books Week, and I can’t think of a better way to observe this week than to read George Orwell’s 1984:

Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed — would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper — the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

Or, you could read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Catcher in the Rye. Lord of the Flies. The Color Purple. The Outsiders.

Any of the Harry Potter books. Any of the Goosebumps series. Or maybe Where’s Waldo?

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, all about a different kind of totalitarian society.

Or you could read Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.

Any of those would be good. They’re all frequently-challenged books.

Censorship is non-partisan. There are books challenged by liberals, books challenged by conservatives, books challenged by the ultra-religious and books challenged by atheists.

I generally like to read in a nice quiet place, but I like to read banned and challenged books as publicly as possible — poke my finger in the eye of the people who would like to make these books unavailable, so to speak. And say, as loudly and clearly as possible, thought is not a crime, and:

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

Sometimes I have a suspicious mind.

Got a phone call early today. A recorded voice said they had detected suspicious activity on my credit card, and asked me to call an 800 number to confirm or deny those transactions.

But I wondered: how do I know this call is really from the bank that issued my credit card? How do I know the 800 number is legit? The whole thing reminds me too much of phishing, which has become familiar in email, but seems new over the phone.

I mention this here because this may be an early sign of a new trend in fraud, and it’s good to be alert to these things.

Update: There is a new scam called “vishing” — phishing by voice. From USA Today:

The upshot: “If you get a telephone call where someone is asking you to provide or confirm any of your personal information, immediately hang up and call your financial institution with the number on the back of the card,” said Paul Henry, a vice president with Secure Computing Corp. “If it was a real issue, they can address the issue.”

Jim Wallis, evangelical Christian, progressive, and author of God’s Politics, has a blog. Currently it features a dialogue with Ralph Reed, the right-wing former leader of the Christian Coalition.

Has potential.

Hey, a new movie! Al Franken: God Spoke. (The website uses a Flash application that doesn’t want to run in my regular browser. C’mon, guys. A little less fancy, a little more accessible, please.)

Distribution seems to be very limited. It will be here in Columbus, Ohio for one day next month. What, did they only make one print?

The trailer and clips look interesting, but distribution and that strange Flash application make it look like they’re trying to hide this movie.

Update: When I bought my ticket, I was told Franken was originally supposed to appear in person, but wouldn’t be here in Columbus. Maybe that’s why the movie’s showing in just one city at a time.

George W. Bush’s polling numbers remain positive in one area: the War on Terror. Naturally, in this year’s elections, Republicans are running on this one great strength. How do you measure the Bush administration’s success against al Qaeda? Here’s one way:

After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Gary Weddle followed the news so closely he forgot to shave. After a week he decided not to shave until Osama bin Laden was caught or killed.

If he’s not careful, Mr. Weddle might get rounded up by the Bush administration and shipped off somewhere for torture.

Atrios on the Republicans’ complaints about Democrats:

They’ve been telling us to clap louder for 3 and a half years, and this is the consequence.

Abraham Lincoln’s Annual Message to Congress on December 1, 1862:

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

The current Republican leadership has chosen “dishonor,” and they don’t want to let go of it.