Posted on 09/05/2010 5:29:14 PM PDT by Kaslin
The month of September 2005 was a very busy month for President Bush after Katrina came on land at the Gulf coast and damaged the area. We see President Bush and First Lady Laura visiting New Orleans and other affected areas in Louisiana and Mississippi to comfort the victims of the hurricane and bring aid
The country lost Chief Justice William Renquist who passed away on September 3, 2005
President Bush nominated Judge Roberts to become the next Chief Supreme Court Justice. On September 29th Justice Roberts was sworn in as the 20th? Supreme Court Chief Justice.
President Bush remembered 9/11 heroes at a Medal of Valor ceremony. He also met with several foreign leaders and addressed the Useless Nations
For the quote of the month I have chosen President Bush’s Remarks which he gave at the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance Service on September 16, 2005
Thank you for the Wonderful Pics!
I Love these!
Make sure to watch The Five on Thursday when Dana is interviewing President Bush. I am going to set my DVR to record the entire hour of the program.
George W. Bush is smarter than you
By Keith Hennessey, April 24, 2013
The new George W. Bush Presidential Center is being dedicated this week. This seems like a good time to bust a longstanding myth about our former President, my former boss.
I teach a class at Stanford Business School titled “Financial Crises in the U.S. and Europe.” During one class session while explaining the events of September 2008, I kept referring to the efforts of the threesome of Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner, who were joined at the hip in dealing with firm-specific problems as they arose.
One of my students asked “How involved was President Bush with what was going on?” I smiled and responded, “What you really mean is, ‘Was President Bush smart enough to understand what was going on,’ right?”
The class went dead silent. Everyone knew that this was the true meaning of the question. Kudos to that student for asking the hard question and for framing it so politely. I had stripped away that decorum and exposed the raw nerve.
I looked hard at the 60 MBA students and said “President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you.”
More silence.
I could tell they were waiting for me to break the tension, laugh, and admit I was joking.
I did not. A few shifted in their seats, then I launched into a longer answer. While it was a while ago, here is an amalgam of that answer and others I have given in similar contexts.
I am not kidding. You are quite an intelligent group. Don’t take it personally, but President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you. Were he a student here today, he would consistently get “HP” (High Pass) grades without having to work hard, and he’d get an “H” (High, the top grade) in any class where he wanted to put in the effort.
For more than six years it was my job to help educate President Bush about complex economic policy issues and to get decisions from him on impossibly hard policy choices. In meetings and in the briefing materials we gave him in advance we covered issues in far more depth than I have been discussing with you this quarter because we needed to do so for him to make decisions.
President Bush is extremely smart by any traditional standard. He’s highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer. It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the advisor would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting.
I use words like briefing and presentation to describe our policy meetings with him, but those are inaccurate. Every meeting was a dialogue, and you had to be ready at all times to be grilled by him and to defend both your analysis and your recommendation. That was scary.
We treat Presidential speeches as if they are written by speechwriters, then handed to the President for delivery. If I could show you one experience from my time working for President Bush, it would be an editing session in the Oval with him and his speechwriters. You think that me cold-calling you is nerve-wracking? Try defending a sentence you inserted into a draft speech, with President Bush pouncing on the slightest weakness in your argument or your word choice.
In addition to his analytical speed, what most impressed me were his memory and his substantive breadth. We would sometimes have to brief him on an issue that we had last discussed with him weeks or even months before. He would remember small facts and arguments from the prior briefing and get impatient with us when we were rehashing things we had told him long ago.
And while my job involved juggling a lot of balls, I only had to worry about economic issues. In addition to all of those, at any given point in time he was making enormous decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan, on hunting al Qaeda and keeping America safe. He was making choices not just on taxes and spending and trade and energy and climate and health care and agriculture and Social Security and Medicare, but also on education and immigration, on crime and justice issues, on environmental policy and social policy and politics. Being able to handle such substantive breadth and depth, on such huge decisions, in parallel, requires not just enormous strength of character but tremendous intellectual power. President Bush has both.
On one particularly thorny policy issue on which his advisors had strong and deep disagreements, over the course of two weeks we (his senior advisors) held a series of three 90-minute meetings with the President. Shortly after the third meeting we asked for his OK to do a fourth. He said, “How about rather than doing another meeting on this, I instead tell you now what each person will say.” He then ran through half a dozen of his advisors by name and precisely detailed each one’s arguments and pointed out their flaws. (Needless to say there was no fourth meeting.)
Every prominent politician has a public caricature, one drawn initially by late-night comedy joke writers and shaped heavily by the press and one’s political opponents. The caricature of President Bush is that of a good ol’ boy from Texas who is principled and tough, but just not that bright.
That caricature was reinforced by several factors:
Does the taxpayer pay for anything in regard to all of these Presidential libraries?
That was wonderful! Just tried to post on Facebook and it censured me and said that the preview was “spammy”!! I got around it but I hate them trying to tell me what I can and cannot post on MY news feed!
Thank you! What a FABULOUS piece! I loved it!
“...He would remember small facts and arguments from the prior briefing...”
I recall an earlier article about a person that advised Bush. He said Bush would just sit there and listen to his experts with out much discussion - just getting the information from his advisors. At first the guy figured Bush wasn’t all that involved or paying attention.
Until several weeks later during another meeting Bush discussed detailed facts and figures from the earlier meeting
President Bush’s Library was all financed through private donations
What idiots, spamming is when you post the same thing over and over.
You’re very welcome
Exactly. They are just being obnoxious. I found a way, though. :)
Thank you, Kaslin!
My pleasure
That is because he listened and let it all soak up, while that arrogant pos occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania does not listen and just talks, and the state run media thinks he is so smart. When in reality the opposite is true
Thanks for the PING to this great article!
I watched the GWB Library Dedication. IMHO I believe history will conform that he was one of our truly great presidents!
That was quite a flattering article about GWB and I don’t doubt one word of it. This should get the libs’ panties in a wad so I hope Hennessey is up for the onslaught.
Oh it will. You can count on it. After all they are so predictable
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