Dowd On Bush as the Modern Jefferson

Here's a bit out of Maureen Dowd's latest NY Times op-ed piece. Here she cits a bit out of Matt Latimer's tell all biography about George Bush. Here's the bit where Bush is supposed to go give a speech at Monticello and boast that he has matched Thomas Jefferson in his legislative accomplishments for education:

My favorite part is when the White House political office suggests that W. go to Monticello and make a speech pointing out that his legacy matched Thomas Jefferson’s. “Jefferson had founded the University of Virginia,” Latimer writes, describing the aides’ reasoning. “Well, they said, Bush had gotten the No Child Left Behind Act passed. Jefferson had authored the Declaration of Independence. Well, Bush had launched the Freedom Agenda in Afghanistan and Iraq. Jefferson had authored the Virginia statute for religious freedom. Well, that was just like the president’s faith-based initiative.” Latimer balked, noting that “if Bush actually went to Monticello to proclaim himself the Thomas Jefferson of our day, there’d be grounds to question his sanity.”

Bush was a dufus. Nixon was a dufus. Americans have a bad habit of falling in love with right wing rhetoric and voting for the idiots who use the speech writers to mouth the right wing platitudes that Americans want to hear. (Yesterday William Safire died. I positively abhor that guy. To me he is the American version of Joseph Goebbels. In the late 1960s Safire used his speech-writing skills to create the "culture wars" that still inflict the US.)