In article <[email hidden]>, Mark Hickey
Quoted message said:Heh heh heh
Quoted message said:Yada yada yada
For brevity I selected the only cogent and truthful parts of your latest
attempt to digress, divert and deceive. Keep on cackling.
For those interested in the real impact of the sanctions, and for an eerily
prescient pre-invasion ordinary-Iraqi-eye view of what the US's "taking
matters into its own hands" would end up as, get hold of Emmy-award winning
documentary filmmaker Shelley Saywell's "Generation of Hate":
http://www.cbc.ca/witness/iraq/index.html
Everything that is happening now was not only eminently predictable but
also predicted, by everyone who knew anything about the matter.
Unfortunately none of these had any clout in this administration of dunces.
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The Dunce
His former Harvard Business School professor recalls George W. Bush not
just as a terrible student but as spoiled, loutish and a pathological liar.
- - - - - - - - - - - - By Mary Jacoby
Sept. 16, 2004 | For 25 years, Yoshi Tsurumi, one of George W. Bush's
professors at Harvard Business School, was content with his green-card
status as a permanent legal resident of the United States. But Bush's
ascension to the presidency in 2001 prompted the Japanese native to secure
his American citizenship. The reason: to be able to speak out with the full
authority of citizenship about why he believes Bush lacks the character and
intellect to lead the world's oldest and most powerful democracy.
"I don't remember all the students in detail unless I'm prompted by
something," Tsurumi said in a telephone interview Wednesday. "But I always
remember two types of students. One is the very excellent student, the type
as a professor you feel honored to be working with. Someone with strong
social values, compassion and intellect -- the very rare person you never
forget. And then you remember students like George Bush, those who are
totally the opposite."
The future president was one of 85 first-year MBA students in Tsurumi's
macroeconomic policies and international business class in the fall of 1973
and spring of 1974. Tsurumi was a visiting associate professor at Harvard
Business School from January 1972 to August 1976; today, he is a professor
of international business at Baruch College in New York.
Trading as usual on his father's connections, Bush entered Harvard in 1973
for a two-year program. He'd just come off what George H.W. Bush had once
called his eldest son's "nomadic years" -- partying, drifting from job to
job, working on political campaigns in Florida and Alabama and, most
famously, apparently not showing up for duty in the Alabama National Guard.
Harvard Business School's rigorous teaching methods, in which the professor
interacts aggressively with students, and students are encouraged to
challenge each other sharply, offered important insights into Bush, Tsurumi
said. In observing students' in-class performances, "you develop pretty
good ideas about what are their weaknesses and strengths in terms of
thinking, analysis, their prejudices, their backgrounds and other things
that students reveal," he said.
One of Tsurumi's standout students was Rep. Chris Cox, R-Calif., now the
seventh-ranking member of the House Republican leadership. "I typed him as
a conservative Republican with a conscience," Tsurumi said. "He never
confused his own ideology with economics, and he didn't try to hide his
ignorance of a subject in mumbo jumbo. He was what I call a principled
conservative." (Though clearly a partisan one. On Wednesday, Cox called for
a congressional investigation of the validity of documents that CBS News
obtained for a story questioning Bush's attendance at Guard duty in
Alabama.)
Bush, by contrast, "was totally the opposite of Chris Cox," Tsurumi said.
"He showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on
his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said
30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I
challenged him." When asked to explain a particular comment, said Tsurumi,
Bush would respond, "Oh, I never said that." A White House spokeswoman did
not return a phone call seeking comment.
In 1973, as the oil and energy crisis raged, Tsurumi led a discussion on
whether government should assist retirees and other people on fixed incomes
with heating costs. Bush, he recalled, "made this ridiculous statement and
when I asked him to explain, he said, 'The government doesn't have to help
poor people -- because they are lazy.' I said, 'Well, could you explain
that assumption?' Not only could he not explain it, he started backtracking
on it, saying, 'No, I didn't say that.'"
If Cox had been in the same class, Tsurumi said, "I could have asked him to
challenge that and he would have demolished it. Not personally or
emotionally, but intellectually."
Bush once sneered at Tsurumi for showing the film "The Grapes of Wrath,"
based on John Steinbeck's novel of the Depression. "We were in a discussion
of the New Deal, and he called Franklin Roosevelt's policies 'socialism.'
He denounced labor unions, the Securities and Exchange Commission,
Medicare, Social Security, you name it. He denounced the civil rights
movement as socialism. To him, socialism and communism were the same thing.
And when challenged to explain his prejudice, he could not defend his
argument, either ideologically, polemically or academically."
Students who challenged and embarrassed Bush in class would then become the
subject of a whispering campaign by him, Tsurumi said. "In class, he
couldn't challenge them. But after class, he sometimes came up to me in the
hallway and started bad-mouthing those students who had challenged him. He
would complain that someone was drinking too much. It was innuendo and
lies. So that's how I knew, behind his smile and his smirk, that he was a
very insecure, cunning and vengeful guy."
Many of Tsurumi's students came from well-connected or wealthy families,
but good manners prevented them from boasting about it, the professor said.
But Bush seemed unabashed about the connections that had brought him to
Harvard. "The other children of the rich and famous were at least well bred
to the point of realizing universal values and standards of behavior,"
Tsurumi said. But Bush sometimes came late to class and often sat in the
back row of the theater-like classroom, wearing a bomber jacket from the
Texas Air National Guard and spitting chewing tobacco into a cup.
"At first, I wondered, 'Who is this George Bush?' It's a very common name
and I didn't know his background. And he was such a bad student that I
asked him once how he got in. He said, 'My dad has good friends.'" Bush
scored in the lowest 10 percent of the class.
The Vietnam War was still roiling campuses and Harvard was no exception.
Bush expressed strong support for the war but admitted to Tsurumi that he'd
gotten a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard through his father's
connections.
"I used to chat up a number of students when we were walking back to
class," Tsurumi said. "Here was Bush, wearing a Texas Guard bomber jacket,
and the draft was the No. 1 topic in those days. And I said, 'George, what
did you do with the draft?' He said, 'Well, I got into the Texas Air
National Guard.' And I said, 'Lucky you. I understand there is a long
waiting list for it. How'd you get in?' When he told me, he didn't seem
ashamed or embarrassed. He thought he was entitled to all kinds of
privileges and special deals. He was not the only one trying to twist all
their connections to avoid Vietnam. But then, he was fanatically for the
war."
Tsurumi told Bush that someone who avoided a draft while supporting a war
in which others were dying was a hypocrite. "He realized he was caught,
showed his famous smirk and huffed off."
Tsurumi's conclusion: Bush is not as dumb as his detractors allege. "He was
just badly brought up, with no discipline, and no compassion," he said.
In recent days, Tsurumi has told his story to various print and television
outlets and appears in Kitty Kelley's exposé "The Family: The Real Story of
the Bush Dynasty." He said other professors and students at the business
school from that time share his recollections but are afraid to come
forward, fearing ostracism or retribution. And why is Tsurumi speaking up
now? Because with the ongoing bloodshed in Iraq and Osama bin Laden still
on the loose -- not to mention a federal deficit ballooning out of control
-- the stakes are too high to remain silent. "Obviously, I don't think he
is the best person" to be running the country, he said. "I wanted to
explain why."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Mary Jacoby is Salon's Washington correspondent.
--
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
Please excuse the inconvenience allegedly caused by our son. Send
us the bill for all the damages, and we can settle this to your
satisfaction, without any need for a public record of the incident.
Most Sincerely, George and Bar
