Reading Lists for Presidents: From My Pet Goat to The Post American World

What a nice surprise. The president of the United States can read again. An end to my pet goat (what Bush was reading aloud to school children as the 9/11 Reichstag fire took place). George Bush Jr. was proud that he had managed to read Albert Camus’ The Stranger on summer holiday. Most people with even a little bit of intellectual get and go have read Camus by the time they are through high school.

ex-President George Bush reading My Pet Goat on 9/11: Heck of a job, Brownie!

Columnists can go back to recommending books (above grade six level) for the president of the United States and hope that he could read them. The issue is not whether President Obama could read or understand the book but if he would have time. Why the right wing semi-intellectuals ever admired Bush Jr. is beyond me.

Perhaps, the whole man of action meme. They feel like they are the nasty geeks backing the stupid school bully. As long as Goliath is in their corner, they can just do whatever awful thing they like to the rest of their classmates. Well it turns out this colossus has feet of clay and the stones will be falling on their collective shifty heads for a good decade or two – or perhaps until the last syllable of recorded time. The worst presidency in the history of the United States will not be forgotten soon and its crimes will only grow with time. We still haven’t forgotten the psychopathic Nero.

I would hate to think that to be a man of action, one has to be an imbecile – or at best a crafty, slacking bully.

Maybe talk is cheap, but thought is not.

Presdient Barrack Obama reading The Post American World

Why are we so on fire on the left? For the first time in several decades, leadership in the US seems to be following Plato’s model. Perhaps President Obama is not so reluctantly being dragged out of his philosopher’s cave, but at least he started as a thinker, a teacher (law professor) and a helper of men (community organizer).