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a want

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George Dubya

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It's all relative. You can't be dumb and reach the highest office in the land. W. wasn't a great public speaker, but he was by no means dumb.

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Anyone know what today's Troll of the Day prize is?

It's got to be pretty sweet, given the effort I'm seeing put forth by several posters here this afternoon.

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Bush never traveled outside of the US until he was president. I find that bewildering and at the same time telling.

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You have to be a globetrotter to be intelligent?

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In terms of understanding history and the political process, Reagan was severely lacking. But again, he was not dumb.

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You ever listen to the man's radio broadcasts?

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I'm not sure how anyone can have this kind of opinion about Reagan.

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Reagan's was an astonishing performance - and, to academic observers, nearly incomprehensible. Reagan knew next to no history, and the little he did know he tailored to support his firmly held preconceptions. He treated biblical references to Armageddon as operational predictions. Many of the historical anecdotes he was so fond of recounting had no basis in fact, as facts are generally understood. In a private conversation, he once equated Gorbachev with Bismarck, arguing that both had overcome identical domestic obstacles by moving away from a centrally planned economy toward the free market. I advised a mutual friend that Reagan should be warned to never repeat this preposterous proposition to a German interlocutor. The friend, however, thought it unwise to pass on the warning, lest it drive the comparison all the more deeply into Reagan's mind.

The details of foreign policy bored Reagan. He had absorbed a few basic ideas about the dangers of appeasement, the evils of communism, and the greatness of his own country, but analysis of substantive issues was not his forte. All of this caused me to remark, during what I thought was an off-the-record talk before a conference of historians and the Library of Congress: "When you talk to Reagan you sometimes wonder why it occurred to anyone that he should be president, or even governor."

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