Bush ain't Dumb, him smart

A remarkable sophist at a blog called the American Thinker, opines on the goodness inherent in the elevation of Rice to head the State Department. All well and good if you like the taste of the Kool-Aid. You see she is real smart, and wouldn't you know, a Provost at Stanford, and frankly when a real smart person lands in that post, it is almost like a real good Turkey in the oven. Good but not perfect, until all the basting is done, then great. Condi was basted with even more smarts, and is the perfect Captain to steer the ship of state. About 2/3rds the way down our friend takes a detour and tells us the Bush is also real smart and not "stupid" like some liberals say him is.

The “Bush is stupid” meme still survives among certain segments of the American self-styled intelligentsia ("stupidigentsia" would be a more appropriate term, if it existed), despite his repeated shellacking of his opponents. But even those who are prepared to admit that he is a formidable opponent (think: State Department insiders) fail to understand the depth of his training in the theory and practice of executive leadership. President Bush is an expert at organizational change.

When he was a student at Harvard Business School, President Bush studied the process of changing entrenched dysfunctional organizations. He learned in detail how to identify and analyze the sources of resistance to change, how to “unfreeze” an organization from its accepted way of doing things, and how to use the tools available to an executive, in order to install a self-reinforcing cycle forcing even the most reluctant surviving bureaucrats to behave in new ways.

One of the capstones of his learning at HBS was a detailed case study of change at a very large bank. The newly-written (when the President was a first year MBA student) case followed the actions of a young executive, dispatched by the powerful CEO of this bank to turnaround the back office check-clearing operations, which were becoming increasingly expensive, while delivering poor quality service.

I guess I'll have to take his word for it him being Thomas Lifson (received his MBA from Harvard a year after George W. Bush.) Clearly only turkeys basted at august institutions of higher learning, truly understand the world and only they can change it for the better.