In honor of the recent opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library, Keith Hennessey tells us something about Former US President George W. Bush I never would have read in The New York Times.* He teaches an MBA class at Stanford U and one of the aspiring, bright leading-lights in America’s next colossal mortgage meltdown asked him if George W. Bush was smart. Dumb question. Particularly if the student was a snide liberal hoping Mr. Hennessey would him, haw and duck. Hennessey, to his credit, answered below.
President Bush is extremely smart by any traditional standard. He’s highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer. It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the advisor would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting. I use words like briefing and presentation to describe our policy meetings with him, but those are inaccurate. Every meeting was a dialogue, and you had to be ready at all times to be grilled by him and to defend both your analysis and your recommendation. That was scary.
So George W. Bush, like most sentient, literate human beings, is smarter than the “smart-set” that ridiculed him in the blogs and the newspapers. Does that mean he was good? Does that mean I miss him yet? I’d say he got a bum rap. Like any intelligent person called stupid by Maureen Dowd or Joe Biden, he was pilloried unfairly unless you believe the old saw that it takes one to know one. But no, I can’t say I quite miss George W. Bush. I explain below.
Being the profoundly intellectual and curious individual we all know her to be, Senator Elizabeth Warren is on the warpath for answers.* Her null hypothesis clearly remains that there is no such thing as a stupid question. Otherwise, she never would have asked the following:
“If we started in 1960, and we said that, as productivity goes up — that is, as workers are producing more — then the minimum wage is going to go up the same,” the Massachusetts senator said during the hearing. “And, if that were the case, the minimum wage today would be about $22 an hour. So, my question … is what happened to the other $14.75?” she asked University of Massachusetts professor of economics Arindrajit Dube:
The press is convinced that conservatives do not like them because of conjured up, imaginary reasons. That couldn’t be further from the truth. This past week, the press gave us yet another example of why conservatives have legitimate reason to hate them. Yesterday, one of the best media critics in America, Howard Kurtz, wrote a column at CNN.com about conservatives blaming the liberal media for | Read More »
Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss Q1 GDP numbers, what they may predict for the economy and Paul Krugman’s spat with Ben Bernanke. We’re brought to you as always by Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at | Read More »
Paul Krugman wants to tax all sorts of things and in his zeal to tax (coupled with his partisan hackery) he chooses to ignore the GOP was willing to raise taxes on the Super Committee. Krugman wants to tax the rich, tax financial transactions, tax pretty much everything. It has become the Democrats’ mantra: tax, tax, tax. But they still can’t deal with this question: | Read More »
Paul Krugman posits himself as the conscience of a liberal at the New York Times. If he speaks for liberals, liberals are truly disgusting. I assume and believe that most liberals reject this and hope many of them will be vocal about the disagreement. And the New York Times might want to rethink using Krugman’s conscience as that of a typical liberal. Today he remembers | Read More »
Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Ben Domenech is joined by Rand Simberg, to discuss the end of NASA’s manned space program, Paul Krugman’s latest idiocy regarding space and preview of what Rand thinks the future of space exploration looks like. We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like | Read More »
Dear Mr. Krugman, In regards to your recent blog post maintaining that “patients are not consumers,” and what’s more that such a depiction of a relationship is “sickening” — your romantic image of health care, apparently garnered from too many viewings of ER, House M.D., or perhaps General Hospital, apparently consists of handsome wisecracking surgeons facing a barrage of patients bleeding out or dealing with | Read More »
Nobel laureate economist and Princeton Professor Paul Krugman opines on the causes of a recent run-up in food prices: Droughts, Floods and Food By PAUL KRUGMAN February 6, 2011 So what’s behind the [food and commodity] price spike? American right-wingers (and the Chinese) blame easy-money policies at the Federal Reserve, with at least one commentator declaring that there is “blood on Bernanke’s hands.” … But | Read More »
Thank you Senators Tom Coburn (R-OK) and John McCain (R-AZ) for issuing the report, Summertime Blues. I have been laughing for one whole day after reading some of the project that President Obama considers “stimulus.” One needs to ask the ever smug Paul Krugman over at the New York Times to explain how $144,541 of your tax dollars spent to study how “monkeys react under the influence | Read More »
Paul Krugman has just declared the onset of another Great Depression. To him a Depression is characterized by a long-term deflationary trap, but that’s not the reason Depressions are to be avoided. Depressions are bad because of long-term unemployment, which tears at people’s lives and at the fabric of society. So far, I’m with him. After all, to the best of my knowledge, I’m the | Read More »
From the diaries, by Erick. Today’s New York Times features Paul Krugman continuing his role in Obama propaganda machine while pretending to be an Economist. In today’s installment of “I have a Nobel, so I must know Economics”, Krugman lashes out at “The Destructive Center”. Before I spend a few paragraphs taking issue with Krugman’s direct points, I think we first have to reflect on | Read More »
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