Christopher Hitchens: Why Dubya Can’t Read.

I kicked myself hard when I read the profile of

Governor George W. Bush, by my friend and colleague Gail Sheehy, in this month’s Vanity Fair. All those jokes and cartoons

and websites about his gaffes, bungles and malapropisms? We’ve been unknowingly teasing the afflicted. The poor guy is

obviously dyslexic, and dyslexic to the point of near-illiteracy. Numerous experts and friends of the dynasty give Sheehy their

considered verdict to this effect.

The symptoms and clues have been staring us in the face for some time. Early in the campaign, Bush said that he did indeed

crack the odd book and was even at that moment absorbed by James Chace’s biography of Dean Acheson. But when asked to

report anything that was in the damn volume, the governor pulled up an empty net. His brother Neil is an admitted dyslexic.

His mother has long been a patron of various foundations and charities associated with dyslexia. How plain it all now seems.

So Bush is dyslexic. Should we compassionately temper our contempt, be ashamed of having such politically incorrect fun with someone with a disability? No, as Hitchens points out; his own chief of staff has noted that Dubya’s atttention span seems no longer than fifteen minutes. What does this make, for example, of his assertion that he personally reviewed the clemency petition of more than a hundred of Texas’ condemned prisoners? Can someone cripplingly dyslexic, even if nonverbal IQ is inflated in compensation (as I have often seen to be the case, but which Hitchens [and I] doubt is the case in Bush’s case), do the President’s job? The Nation