With public opinion polls showing President Bush not only at all-time lows, but considered an utter nincompoop by a majority of voters, leading Presidential treatises are now being hastily, and radically, revised.

For example, now under revision is the classic, The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House, by the venerable late political scientist, James David Barber. While Professor Barber previously categorized all presidents along the spectrum of¬† “active/positive,” “active/negative,” “passive/positive” and “passive/negative,” his adherents now claim that Bush’s performance merits an entirely new category: “Idiot/Moron.”

As explained by one of Professor Barber’s former teaching assistants, the “Idiot/Moron” scale is the gentile version of the Jewish “Shlemiel/Shlemazle,” referring, respectively, to the guy who invariably spills his soup on someone else, and the poor fellow who ends up with the hot soup in his lap.

Under the amended Barber test, Bush is not only an “Idiot,” for starting a completely unnecessary war in Iraq and screwing up the entire world, but also a “Moron” for letting the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz Neo-Cons talk him into this debacle, and thus also ruining his own Presidency. “Unfortunately for Bush,” added Dr. Barber’s protege, “he’s not Jewish, as ‘Shlemiel/Shlemazle’ doesn’t sound quite as bad as ‘Idiot/Moron’.”

Similarly, under the paradigm formulated by another leading presidential scholar, the late Richard E. Neustadt, “personal persuasion” and “public prestige” are the litmus tests for judging Presidents.

In fact, Al Gore, one of Professor Neustadt’s students at Harvard, who claims to be in the process of “inventing” a “new Neustadt test,” asserts that Bush’s prestige is now so low, he couldn’t even persuade a Halliburton executive to raid a lockbox.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian and best-selling author of books on Lincoln and FDR, takes a different approach, judging presidents by the people they surround themselves with.¬† “In contrast to Lincoln,” she explained, “who drew on the talents of a Stanton, Seward and Chase,¬†Bush’s most trusted advisor is a guy who goes by the nickname ‘Turd Blossom’.”

 

BLOGWORTHIES:

Kristol Meth?: Crooks and Liars on Bill Kristol’s attack on Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald.

Fascinating report in yesterday’s New York Times, highlighting that the leaked excerpt from the NIE, concerning Iraq’s attempts to purchase uranium, was highly disputed by many high-level officials of the Bush Administration itself. An alternative theory offered for the leak is that Bush and Cheney were not necessarily trying to establish that they were right on that issue — after all, Bush had already conceded that its inclusion in the State of the Union Address was a mistake — but that they were trying to pin the blame on the CIA. However, even then, the Administration exaggerated the CIA’s position by mischaracterizing its finding as a “key judgment.”

And this from the Gang who claims they don’t like to “play the blame game.”

And who else to take “poetic license” on this issue but the unique Madkane.¬†