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Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review January 2, 2009 / 6 Teves 5769

Dummies

By Linda Chavez


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Karl Rove's recent revelation of President George W. Bush's passion for books wasn't a surprise to me. In a Wall Street Journal column last week, Rove explained that for the last three years, he and the president have had a friendly rivalry to see who could finish more books during the year. Rove won each year — but the president was no piker. In the three years of the competition, the president read 186 books to Rove's 250.


Much of the intelligentsia no doubt will be shocked to learn George W. Bush is an avid reader of serious books, but it simply confirms something I already suspected. During the first real discussion I ever had with then-Gov. Bush in 1998, he brought up a book written by a former colleague of mine at the Manhattan Institute.


Myron Magnet's "The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass" isn't the sort of book you come across if your taste goes to light reading. A scathing dissection of good intentions gone awry, Magnet's book lays bare the folly of liberal interventions on behalf of the poor and the devastating role of the counterculture in creating the underclass. But it's no red-meat screed of the sort that has propelled many well-known pundits to the top of the best-seller list either. Magnet is not a polemicist, but a serious scholar and elegant writer. Bush's reference to the book spoke worlds to me.


Liberals have always believed they have a monopoly on intelligence. Of all the Republican presidents in my lifetime, I can only recall one who was given high marks for raw intellect: Richard M. Nixon. But he was considered by many liberals as a Machiavellian exception that proved the rule that conservatives are dopes. In liberals' telling, Eisenhower and Ford were middle-brow Midwesterners who preferred the golf links to books; Reagan was a B-film actor capable of giving a good speech that someone else wrote; and the two Bushes were Yale graduates by way of money and pedigree, not merit.


Of course we now know — thanks to the publication of "Reagan, In His Own Hand," a reproduction of Reagan's early handwritten speeches — that Ronald Reagan was often his own best wordsmith and that his ideas were original, not borrowed. And perhaps liberals will now grudgingly acknowledge that Dwight D. Eisenhower must have had something on the ball, if not for his role in defeating the uber-smart Germans during World War II, at least for contributing to the gene pool of granddaughter Susan Eisenhower, who proved how smart she was by endorsing the brainy Barack Obama.


Contrary to the stereotype that all conservatives are narrow-minded dummies, I've found that conservatives are far more likely to be familiar with liberal intellectual thought than liberals are with the views of conservative intellectuals.


Bush's reading list was instructive not just because it was so long but because it included authors whose political orientation was different from the president's own. Included on the list provided by Rove were works by authors David Halberstam, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and James M. McPherson, all liberals, as well as the novel "The Stranger" by Albert Camus, generally regarded as an existentialist, though he eschewed the label.


It would be a little like learning that Bill Clinton's reading list in office included works by James Q. Wilson, Stephan Thernstrom, and Harvey Klehr, as well as Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead." But what we know of his reading habits reveal Clinton to be predictable. A list of his 21 favorite books, compiled for his presidential library, included authors Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, Taylor Branch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and, naturally, Hillary Clinton — all well to the left on the political spectrum.


Bush's book list isn't likely to convince his critics that the president's intellect is equal to their exalted own. And I can even imagine some complaining that the number of books the president read proves he was ignoring his job. But perhaps Rove's article will at least dispel a favorite caricature: Bush the Dummy.

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JWR contributor Linda Chavez is President of the Center for Equal Opportunity. Her latest book is "Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics". (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.)

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