He makes me so proud...

...Everytime he goes overseas (video link). (I wonder if he splattered anything on Blair's pink silk tie?)

Juan Cole assembled the likely order of comments, based on several published accounts, and concludes about Bush's insightful assessment of the Middle East,

It is an astonishingly simple-minded view of the situation, painted in black and white and making assumptions about who is who's puppet and what the Israeli motivations are...

[snip]

It is a little window into the superficial, one-sided mind of the man, who has for six years been way out of his depth.

I come away from it shaken and trembling.

Coincidentally, in his column "Is Bush Still Too Dumb to be President?" Jonathan Chait zeroes in on a remarkable item in Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine.

Ron Suskind's new book, "The One Percent Doctrine," paints a harrowing picture of Bush's intellectual limits. Bush, writes Suskind, "is not much of a reader." He prefers verbal briefings and often makes a horse-sense judgment based on how confident his briefer seems in what he's saying. In August 2001, the CIA was in a panic about an upcoming terrorist attack and drafted a report with the title, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." When a CIA staffer summed up the memo's contents in a face-to-face meeting with Bush, the president found the briefer insufficiently confident and dismissed him by saying, "All right, you've covered your ass, now," according to Suskind. That turned out to be a fairly disastrous judgment.

I'd love to read Suskind's book this summer, but I've already got too many underway and several more to read for an upcoming exam. So I will be checking in regularly as Tristero at Hullabaloo blogs about it.