Bush on Stage: Deft or Just Lacking Depth? We already know the answer to that rhetorical question. The deftness is his handlers’; left to his own resources, he’s a lightweight and a bungler with a slightly panicked tone around whether he’ll be able to stick to the talking points with which he’s been prepped. That’s why it’ll be a long while before he fields questions at a press conference and, oh what a performance that’ll be! Michael O’Hanlon, defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, observing his justification of the Iraqi airstrike, said he “seemed to merge different concepts in his head in a random and somewhat illogical way,” e.g. saying that enforcing the no-fly zones was keeping Saddam Hussein bound to the Gulf War peace accord, when it is nothing of the kind. Republican aides seem to be going to extraordinary lengths to explain and even glorify Dubya’s brevity of response, pointing out that the Americans appreciate someone so to the point and that the public has a limited attention span. And, you know, I think they’re right about that. I continue to rail about his intellectual shortcomings without ever remembering that I’m probably barking up the wrong tree. It’s not that the public doesn’t realize, it’s that they don’t care how lightweight he is. Anti-intellectualism carries the day, and the people who think are likely to be the most disenfranchised — and enraged — in the Age of the Shrub. Washington Post