-Caveat Lector- ------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Thu, 02 Aug 2001 20:59:02 +0000 From: Robert Sterling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Konformist: Update: Shrub Is Still Stupid & Evil To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [ Double-click this line for list subscription options ] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Small business owners... Tell us what you think! http://us.click.yahoo.com/vO1FAB/txzCAA/ySSFAA/zgSolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Please send as far and wide as possible. Thanks, Robert Sterling Editor, The Konformist http://www.konformist.com It's Scientifically Proven: Shrub Is A Dumb-Ass The intelligence of our presidents has never been seriously scrutinized at any time in our history until now. There is a widespread perception that President GW Bush is not qualified for the position he holds. That increasing awareness by the people has led to a study of the intellectual ability of all presidents for the past fifty years. There have been twelve presidents in that time, from F. D. Roosevelt to G. W. Bush. All were rated based on any scholarly achievements, writings that they alone wrote, their ability to speak effectively, and several other psychological factors. The conclusions of the study, conducted by an independent think tank located in Scranton, Pennsylvania were surprising. This think tank includes high caliber historians, psychiatrists, sociologists, scientists in human behavior, and psychologists. Among their ranks are Dr. Werner Levenstein, world-renowned sociologist, and Professor Patricia A. Williams, a world-respected psychiatrist. All members of the think tank are experts at being able to detect a person's IQ from the criteria stated earlier. After four months of research, these learned men and women have determined the IQs of each president within a range of five percentage points. The IQs listed below are the norms for each president. ß 147 Franklin D. Roosevelt (D) ß 132 Harry Truman (D) ß 122 Dwight D. Eisenhower (R) ß 174 John F. Kennedy (D) ß 126 Lyndon B. Johnson (D) ß 155 Richard M. Nixon (R) ß 121 Gerald Ford (R) ß 175 James E. Carter (D) ß 105 Ronald Reagan (R) ß 99 George HW Bush (R) ß 182 William J. Clinton (D) ß 91 George W. Bush (R) The non-partisan researchers who evaluated the twelve presidents determined that the six Republican presidents for the past 50 years had an average IQ of 115.5, with President Nixon having the highest IQ, at 155. President G. W. Bush was rated the lowest of all the Republicans with an IQ of 91. The six Democrat presidents had IQs with an average of 156, with President Clinton having the highest IQ, at 182. President Lyndon B. Johnson was rated the lowest of all the Democrats with an IQ of 126. The margin of error is plus or minus five percent. This study was initiated on February 13, 2001 and completed on June 17, 2001. This study validated the widespread feeling of people about the sitting president. President Bush was rated low because of his inability to command the English language, his lack of any scholarly achievements, and an absenceof anything authored by him that would reflect an intellectual effort. ***** http://www.thenation.com The Bush Dyslexicon An Interview with Mark Crispin Miller Ever since the presidential campaign, George W. Bush's adventures in the English language have alternately amused and horrified the nation. But according to media scholar Mark Crispin Miller's scathing new book, The Bush Dyslexicon, to conclude merely that Bush is dimwitted would be a grave mistake. The President's linguistic fumbles, argues Miller, mask a deep and shrewd political vindictiveness; at the same time, the shallowness revealed in Bush's unscripted remarks has been largely ignored or coddled by a national media more interested in soundbites than in political substance. Recently Miller, a professor of media ecology at New York University and the author of two previous books about the media, responded to e- mailed questions by discussing Bush's speech patterns, his similarities with Richard Nixon, his alleged dyslexia and the role that our media system played in putting Bush in office. Patricia Chui You state that although it's easy to laugh at President Bush's gaffes, "we misunderestimate him at our peril." Why? Although he has some drastic intellectual limitations (to put it mildly), Bush is not the drooling cretin who's been so derisively lampooned in the political cartoons, stand-up routines and quickie books. Despite his patent awkwardness before the cameras, Bush does possess a certain nasty shrewdness, which has often served him well at the combative kind of politics. As the late Jim Hatfield pointed out in Fortunate Son, this Bush was centrally involved in his dad's filthy presidential drive in 1988. The on-air counterblast against Dan Rather, the Willie Horton gambit and the outing of Jimmy Swaggart were moves that Bush the Younger helped devise and orchestrate. This is why Mary Matalin has admiringly deemed W "a political campaign terrorist"--not a mere tool of, say, Karl Rove, but a full-fledged collaborator. In any case, to cast Bush as an utter moron only does him an enormous favor, since it helps his propagandists, and the major media, to keep hailing his embarrassing performance as a great success: "much better than expected." If anyone has ever benefited from what Bush has called "the bigotry of soft expectations," it's George W. Bush himself. Do you have a favorite Bushism? "You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test." In your book, you list patterns in the way Bush speaks--for example, as you put it, "A is A because A is A." Could you give a specific example here of one of those patterns, and explain what it says about Bush? There is a lot of speculation and I guess there is going to continue to be a lot of speculation until the speculation ends. -Austin-American Statesman, October 18, 1998 BRIT HUME: What if there isn't any unity at the Republican convention? GOV. BUSH: I am confident there will be. I'm confident people are coming together. And the reason I believe this is because our party is united. -Fox Television, July 19, 2000 If you don't stand for anything, you don't stand for anything. If you don't stand for something, you don't stand for anything. -Austin-American Statesman, November 2, 2000 This logical tic betrays the perfect emptiness of much that Bush says off the cuff. A wholly televisual being (although startlingly untelegenic), Bush often uses speech not to say anything, but merely to depict himself as saying something, "boldly" and "decisively." Tautology is but the intellectual consequence of just such verbal posturing. Why have "the liberal media" given Bush such a free pass? Because, of course, "the media" are not "liberal"--and anyone who thinks they are at this point simply cannot be convinced, however copious the evidence. To put it very simply, the media system's flagrant bias against Gore-- and its suppression of Ralph Nader--demonstrates the influence of several factors: the corporate concentration of the media, which has helped shift the news divisions even further to the right; the unprecedented affluence of the Washington press corps, whose class interests bound them more directly to Bush/Cheney than to Gore; the vast success of the long rightist propaganda drive against "the liberal media," which has made the telejournalists (and others) skittish about seeming even slightly "leftist"; and the fact that Bush, with his extremely simple "themes" and "messages" and his bone- ignorance on every other subject, was always far more televisual than Gore, who spoke in complex sentences and knew what, for example, Dingell-Norwood was. Even Bush's funny flubs made for good footage, and so the media types felt comfortable with him. Why do you think Al Gore, during the election, was portrayed as a "serial exaggerator," whereas Bush's evasions and falsehoods were downplayed or ignored? The GOP propaganda mill was, and still is, infinitely more effective than Gore's largely half-assed operation. It did a brilliant job concocting all those "serial exaggerations" and impressing them upon us through the too-compliant press. Thus it was throughout the Clinton years, of course, and thus it is today. You paint Bush as closer to the mold of Nixon than Reagan. Could you elaborate? Nixon was political godfather to the House of Bush, mentoring George Herbert Walker from the start of his Congressional career. And Bush/Cheney's top lieutenants made their bones as Nixon creatures in the early '70s: The young Karl Rove did dirty tricks for Nixon in the 1972 campaign, and Mary Matalin was another livid Nixonite. The Bush/Nixon bond is a most peculiar union, given the immense class gap between the Man from Whittier and the would-be dynasty in Kennebunkport. And yet there's an important similarity between them after all. Despite the Bush clan's vast advantage, that crew is, oddly, just as thin-skinned and resentful as the Trickster. Like him, they never forget a slight, and always feel themselves impaired; and so--like Nixon--they tend to favor The Attack. Indeed, it's actually the only thing they do well. Thus Bush the Younger, although ideologically quite close to Ronald Reagan, is temperamentally and psychologically akin to Nixon--a likeness that is growing more apparent day by day. Just like Nixon, this Bush can dish it out, but he can't take it. If Bush is really so far to the right, why did so many centrist "undecideds" vote for him? How did he manage to portray himself as a centrist? Bush "won"--that is, earned the votes of a considerable plurality--in part by masking his true stance on issues like abortion, but mainly by posturing as the Anti-Clinton, who would "restore dignity and honor to the White House." Those Americans who bought the anti- Clinton propaganda were Bush's main constituency; those who bought it most wholeheartedly are now his keenest champions. In promoting the Dyslexicon, I've noticed that this President's grassroots supporters cannot think of anything to say in his defense aside from screaming that he isn't Clinton. That wholly negative appeal, and not his mythic "likability," is Bush's primary asset. Do you think Bush is, as Gail Sheehy has alleged, dyslexic? I would say that he probably is, since he himself has inadvertently confirmed the diagnosis in his very effort to deny it: "That woman who knew I had dyslexia: I never interviewed her." The journalists made merry at that gaffe, because it was, itself, dyslexic; but I hold that the statement is especially significant because of what it accidentally gives away in that first clause: "That woman who knew I had dyslexia." If Bush were not dyslexic, wouldn't he have used a verb like "claimed" or "said," instead of "knew"? Even if he is dyslexic, however, that condition can't account for all his verbal slips, which are so many and so various as to indicate a range of disabilities, including simple ignorance. You emphasize that Bush repeatedly evades questions, offering vague platitudes rather than stating a position. But don't most politicians do the same thing? Of course. What I argue is that Bush shows (or rather, showed) a certain genius for evasion of a particular kind--i.e., representing his most noxious stands as strokes of tolerance and kindness. That move is more insidious than mere evasiveness, and also requires a greater craftiness. According to your book, George W. Bush is a phenomenon of today's media culture and its propensity to dumb down issues and ideas. In that sense, Bush is the perfect figure to represent our modern age. Did we get what we deserve? And if things are headed inexorably in the direction of soundbites and short attention spans, how can we ever expect better? Bush did not win the election. Some 52 percent of those who voted cast their votes against him--whether for the Democrats or for the Greens--and another 1 percent threw in their lot with Pat Buchanan. Therefore, we did not get what we deserve--unless we grant that "we" are guilty of allowing the long rightist takeover of the Supreme Court and of the press. Insofar as "we" all acquiesced in that grand subversion, "we" have reaped what They have sown. As far as the election per se goes, however, we do not deserve to have this man as President, he having been installed through a complex, slow-motion coup d'état. What his installation demonstrates is not that we have been bamboozled, but that we've been ripped off-- and that our media system has, just like our government, become completely unaccountable to us. It is as if TV's top personnel have floated off the planet. Their concerns do not relate to ours in any way. All they care about is what their masters think of them--their owners and their advertisers, and their top contacts in the government--and so they hover high above us, talking only about Gary Condit (this month), variously sucking up to those in power and obsessing on their ever-lower ratings. And so, while they converse in soundbites and have very short attention spans, we are ready for a politics that's made of stronger stuff. And "we"--again--are the majority. This is something that the Democrats had better understand. ***** Bush power deregulation bill won't have deadline WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration is preparing a proposal to deregulate the nation's billion-dollar electricity industry that will not include a deadline for states to open their retail electricity markets to competition, a senior Energy Department official said. "The administration believes it is essential that Congress pass comprehensive electricity legislation," Frank Blake, deputy energy secretary, told a Senate Energy committee hearing on power issues. While Congress has debated a national deregulation plan for some six years, about half of all U.S. states have gone ahead and adopted state deregulation schemes. Some states -- like Pennsylvania and Texas -- have been successful in promoting more competition while California has become a symbol of a poorly designed deregulation plan. Blake said the administration was preparing a deregulation proposal, but did not say how soon the plan would be unveiled. The proposal will focus on broad federal issues and will not require states to open their retail electricity markets by a specific date, he told the panel. "Electricity markets are increasingly regional in nature," Blake said. "The California experience shows that actions taken by one state can have a regional consequence." California, hit by a series of power blackouts during the past year, has gobbled up wholesale electricity from the Pacific Northwest and neighboring states to meet its demand, which in turn has pushed prices higher throughout the West. Earlier this week, Senate Democrats unveiled a plan that would revamp federal regulation of the fast-changing electricity sector, enabling more competition and better power delivery. The plan, offered by Senate Energy Committee Chairman Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat, was generally supported by Blake and power industry executives. But the administration opposes any legislation to address transmission grid pricing, now that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has begun to tackle "non-traditional" transmission rates, Blake said. John Rowe, president of Chicago-based utility Exelon Corp. , said the industry did not support Bingaman's proposal to allow regional compacts to be created to resolve disputes over permits for new transmission lines and facilities. Rowe said such an approach would create an unnecessary bureaucracy, and that siting issues could be handled by regional transmission organizations that are already operating. "Congress has been debating electricity issues for six years. In the meantime, our nation's electricity infrastructure has not kept pace with the growing demands of our new economy," Rowe told the panel. David Cook, general counsel with the North American Electric Reliability Council, urged Senate lawmakers to adopt a deregulation plan that allows an industry self-regulatory organization to develop and enforce reliability rules. "FERC does not now have the technical expertise and resources to take on that effort, and it would not be cost-effective for it to do so," Cook said. Blake said the administration also wants a federal deregulation plan to include the following provisions: * Allow federal siting of transmission facilities "in certain limited circumstances." Construction of some new interstate transmission lines have been blocked by communities due to environmental concerns. * Protect consumers against "slamming and cramming," terms for certain unethical sales practices conducted by aggressive electricity retailers. * Provide open access to transmission systems operated by federal electric utilities such as Bonneville Power Administration and Tennessee Valley Authority. * Repeal the mandatory purchase obligation of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978. * Repeal the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935. * Clarify the right of states to charge "public purpose fees" on retail electricity to help poor families pay electric bills or to help pay for conservation programs. Copyright 2001 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. 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