President Bush is a Reader – And The Left Hates That Too

The BDS crowd reminds me of a phrase I’ve often heard, “If I gave you a pot of gold it would be in the wrong color pot.” Karl Rove writes about the three year reading competition he has had with President Bush in The Wall Street Journal.

With only five days left, my lead is insurmountable. The competition can’t catch up. And for the third year in a row, I’ll triumph. In second place will be the president of the United States. Our contest is not about sports or politics. It’s about books.

It all started on New Year’s Eve in 2005. President Bush asked what my New Year’s resolutions were. I told him that as a regular reader who’d gotten out of the habit, my goal was to read a book a week in 2006. Three days later, we were in the Oval Office when he fixed me in his sights and said, “I’m on my second. Where are you?” Mr. Bush had turned my resolution into a contest.

The books Rove mentions are a mix of histories, biographies, current events and some good fiction by authors like John D. MacDonald, Michael Crichton, and Vince Flynn as well.

And the left can’t stand it.

Richard Cohen writes in the San Jose Mercury News:

The list Rove provides is long, but it is narrow. It lacks whole shelves of books on how and why the Iraq war was a mistake, one that metastasized into a debacle. Absent is Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” Tom Ricks’ “Fiasco,” George Packer’s “The Assassins’ Gate” or, on a related topic, Jane Mayer’s “The Dark Side” about “extraordinary rendition” and other riffs on the Constitution.

In the NYT Jennifer Schuessler asks, “Is it possible for a president to spend too much time reading? I’m beginning to wonder.”

And in The Atlantic?

Anyone who actually reads books knows that reading the words off the page is half the job, at best. The hard part is digesting the book, getting to its essential themes and then weighing them against your own body of knowledge. Look I love books, was raised in the business of publishing books and printing books. But watching a pundit–or president–brag about reading a book a week, is like watching a freshly-minted 21-year old get smashed at a wine-tasting. Only a rookie would set that sort of goal–and then brag about it. Either that or, you know, someone who doesn’t really read…

The comments to the posts above are about what you would expect from the BDS’ers, mostly along the flavor of, “I didn’t know Bush could read”, and My Pet Goat references. Interspersed with the negative Bush comments are Rove-deranged who think you can’t believe anything he says anyhow. Go read a few for a laugh at the unstable.

A friend used to have a a tee shirt with this printed on it:
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend — Karl Marx
Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read — Groucho Marx

Read on, Mr. President.

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