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teach1st Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-14-06 06:27 AM
Original message
Bush book list heavy on history
Bush book list heavy on history
St. Petersburg Times, 5/14

WASHINGTON -- At the lowest point of his presidency, George W. Bush is looking to the past to understand the present.

He's reading biographies and history books and coming away with a few lessons about the problems of his second term.

In an interview last week with the St. Petersburg Times and other Florida newspapers, Bush said he has been devouring history books. He just finished a biography of William Jennings Bryan and had delved into Freedom From Fear, David M. Kennedy's Pulitzer-winning tome about the Depression through World War II.

Bush said he was "a little irritated at myself" because he forgot to bring something new to read on the Florida trip. He's trying to choose between a history of Afghanistan and one about Timbuktu.


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zanne Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-14-06 06:28 AM
Response to Original message
1. I wonder who reads them to him. nt
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liberalnurse Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-14-06 06:40 AM
Response to Reply #1
2. Laura probably does as a bedtime story....
since sex is out of the question....they have to make some noise from the Royal Office.

My real thoughts, my opinion as a nurse......he is confabulating as most pickled brains do at this stage of alcoholism. O8)
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zanne Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-14-06 06:46 AM
Response to Reply #2
4. That is an insult to alcoholics everywhere. : )
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rock Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-14-06 09:29 AM
Response to Reply #1
10. Do they translate as they go?
(You know, into sub-basic-English).
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HuffleClaw Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-14-06 06:46 AM
Response to Original message
3. UTTER BULLSHIT
a complete joke, he can barely utter a complete sentence and we're supposed to believe he reads books without pictures? though, their desperation in spouting this stuff is amusing.
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lumpy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-14-06 01:46 PM
Response to Reply #3
12. BS indeed.
The dope hasn't time to read, busy flitting around trying to keep remedy his ruined reputatiom and repubs in office.
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pretzel4gore Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-14-06 07:06 AM
Response to Original message
5. interesting he mention William Jennings Bryan!
perhaps bush overlooked the 'Lusitania' affair, and President Wilson's Sec of State WJ Bryan's afforts to keep the US out of WW1 against the scheming of the dulles brother's uncle robert lansing, who utilized the sinking of the Lusitania and the loss of 1100 lives, 100 of them americans, to demonise the anti war movement of the day and eventually to succesfully involve the US in britain's effort to deny germany's economic aspirations.....Bryan had wanted to 'warn' US citizens not to travel on 'munitions' ships such as the Lusitania - a fact that R Lansing was able to kept hidden in 1917 when the 'unprovoked' sinking of the passenger ship was the excuse to declare war on germany (and remember that hitler was a soldier in the trenches; consider what he thought of germany being demonised over sinking a ship that was loaded with ammo and intentionally allowed to sail in dangerous waters. perhaps hitler's madness got its start here(?))
Robert lansing and his nephews the dulles brothers were of course the same lot as prescott bush and his mindless spawn, including the curious one george number zero....
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ima_sinnic Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-14-06 07:08 AM
Response to Original message
6. hey, I didn't know they had a Classics Illustrated of Life of WmJ Bryan
... I musta missed that one :D
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reichstag911 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-14-06 07:14 AM
Response to Original message
7. That's not going to go over well...
...with "the base." They like their W ignorant, jes' like them.
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Nay Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-14-06 07:53 AM
Response to Original message
8. Oh, please. Trying to act like an intellectual at this late stage of the
game? It only underscores what an effing idiot this jerk is.

"I read me a coupla books! I'm smart, really I am!"

Pathetic.

In order to understand what's going on, Mr. Bush, you need to go to a shrink and be dopeslapped back into reality.
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Crunchy Frog Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-14-06 08:59 AM
Response to Original message
9. What a pantload. If they say he's devouring books,
they mean it in a literal sense.

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onager Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-14-06 09:49 AM
Response to Original message
11. Somebody make sure he reads this one...
Edited on Sun May-14-06 09:54 AM by onager
(I'm kidding, of course. Bush read? Pfft! Every summer the puppy-dog media runs one of these canned White House press releases bragging about the pResident's heavy vacation reading schedule. I don't buy it for a second. As I remember, Bush constantly slagged book-reading intellectuals until well after 9/11.)

In the late spring of 1912, the graceful yacht "Enchantress" put out to sea from rainy Genoa for a Mediterranean pleasure cruise--a carefree cruise without itinerary or time-schedule...

The "Enchantress" belonged to the British Admiralty. The accomodation aboard was as grand as that on the King's own yacht. The crew numbered nearly a hundred and served a dozen or so guests, who had come from Britain via Paris, where they had stayed at the Ritz.

Among them were the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith; his brilliant 25-year-old daughter Violet; the civilian head of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill; and Churchill's small party of family members and close colleagues.

In the final enchanted years before the First World War brought their world to an end, they were as privileged a group as any the world has known...

The Prime Minister (was) an ardent classicist; he read and wrote with ease and pleasure in classical Greek and Latin.

Winston Churchill, no scholar of ancient languages or literature, was as jealous as a child. "Those Greeks and Romans," he protested. "They are so over-rated. They only said everything FIRST. I've said just as good things myself. But they got in before me."

Violet noted that: "It was in vain that my father pointed out that the world had been going on for quite a long time before the Greeks and Romans appeared on the scene."

The Prime Minister was an intellectual, aware that the trend among historians of the ancient world was away from an exclusive concern with the European cultures of the Greeks and Romans.

...modern civilization--that is, European civilization--had its beginnings not in Greece and Rome, but in the Middle East; in Egypt and Judaea, Babylonia and Assyria, Sumer and Akkad...

In the early years of the Twentieth Century, when Churchill and his guests voyaged aboard the "Enchantress," it was usual to assume that the European powers would continue to play a dominating role in world affairs for as far ahead in time as the mind's eye could see...

Conspicuous among the domains still to be dealt with were those of the Middle East, one of the few regions left on the planet that had not yet been socially, culturally and politically reshaped in the image of Europe.


From A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin
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long_green Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-14-06 03:26 PM
Response to Original message
13. I can see it now
An Uncommon Effulgence: The Life and Times of My Pet Goat
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Sacajawea Donating Member (797 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-14-06 08:40 PM
Response to Original message
14. Hey, moran! I suggest "The March of Folly" by Barbara Tuchman
See especially the last chapter and every time you see the words "Viet Nam", substitute the word "Iraq." That'll tell you everything you need to know about what you've done to this country and its military, and where we're going.

What a fuckwad! Do they really expect us to believe this crap? He reads...yeah, right.
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