Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> On Wed, 29 Jan 2003, Liza Featherstone wrote:
>
> > The man isn't an intelligent person dealing with a learning disability
>
> Actually, you know, he might be just that. Isn't he dyslexic?
Since I wrote the first post on here I have browsed checked up on just a few of the "howlers" that Bush gets mocked for. _NONE_ of them are the kind that come from illiteracy or laziness. All of them are the kind that come from (probably neurological) difficulties with language.
Know your enemy. If Bush is our enemy, and he is, we had damned well better get off this kick of mocking his intelligence. (Many highly intelligent people have gone through Harvard or Yale with a C average (or flunked out for that matter.) There is no connection between difficulties with language and intelligence.
I commented some months ago that the chief need of a friend who suffers from schizophrenia was a few more thousand dollars a month. That's the chief need, in fact, of millions of people who suffer from difficulties with reading or writing (and sometimes with speech). Bush _had_ not thousands but millions, so he could escape the the only _real_ intellectual problem of most of those who suffer from dyslexia -- that is, from the ignorant fuckheads who think bad writing is a moral defect.
Carrol
>
> There are a lot of dyslexics who grow up to be an odd combination of smart
> and (sometimes belligerently) illiterate. Supposedly Bush does have
> remarkable powers of one-on-one charm that are hard to imagine based on
> his public persona. Perhaps that's where his intelligence is on display
> -- his power to read personal cues up close.
>
> Michael