Well, living here across the pond, I can at least say that from about 2001 to 2004, and especially from 2001-2003, people were fawning over him because of 9/11. So it's not like throughout his whole presidency people have been looking to take him down.
I know he says stupid things, and I say plenty myself, but what I find most offensive about him is when he says stupid things that expose his biggest flaw: his lack of curiousity.
Best example I can think of is when like two or three weeks ago he compared Osama bin Laden to Hitler and Lenin, saying that if we don't do something about bin Laden, we're repeating the mistakes we made with both those other guys, mainly, we stood by passively while they accumulated political power and became global threats to peace.
Here's the thing. That statement is not just stupid on its own merits. The person saying it assumes YOU'RE also stupid, the audience, because it's not an issue of opinion, the comparison itself. Lenin didn't assume power in a slow, methodical fashion. He fought a bloody civil war that lasted about four years, and even then during that war Russia's former Allies invaded the country to keep the Bolsheviks from preserving the separate peace they negotiated with imperial Germany.
What Bush wants to do, of course, when he says that sort of thing, is put Communism-Fascism-Islamic fundamentalism in the same category, so it fits a common analogy familiar to Americans and Western Europeans... mainly, Munich. Stalin was repudiated, so by using Lenin instead in the analogy he wants to make a more general statement about Communism and where it stands in his unholy trifecta. The problem is, in particulars, the analogy doesn't work. Hitler and Lenin didn't have similar rises to power.
Why does Bush make that mistake? Because he doesn't give a fuck about details. He doesn't give a shit about whether or not the analogy works. Imagine being the president of the country with the most complex foreign policy and foreign policy machinery in the entire world, and not giving a shit whether or not the information that you use to justify going to war over some WMDs is fabricated or not, whether the cost of the war will be 200 billion or 1.6 trillion... or at domestic level, how your educational programs lack the machinery in practice to deal with even the most common problems in schools... it would all be ok, except everyone else cares.
The quotes, unlike the stupid things most of us say, are not gaffes. They're indicative of someone who can't be bothered to remember things, or to articulate himself clearly, or to pay attention to detail. That's why I say they're not funny anymore, because I'm more cognizant now of not only how incompetent he is, but how he's also a piece of a shit of a human being.
