Re. W's bogus "summer reading list": Let's say Chimpy invited (the late) Albert Camus to lunch--do you suppose they'd split an order of freedom fries?

I've been thinking for weeks now what to say about this head-scratching business of Chimpy the Prez's famous fictitious summer reading list. I keep thinking that something really ought to be said, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what.

Beyond the obvious: that there isn't the slightest chance in hell that our Chimpy has read any of those books, is there? Personally, I'd be surprised if any part of his anatomy has so much as come into contact with any of them.

It would take a heap of proving to convince me that Chimpy has so much as touched a book since The Pet Goat. And we know how that worked out. Probably that nasty business only confirmed his existing conviction that reading books just naturally causes bad things to happen. (On a side note of high hilarity, can you imagine the man who hacked his way through The Pet Goat reading Shakespeare?)

Hey, don't knock the philosophy. It got Chimpy through Yale and Harvard Business School, didn't it? Unless you're one of those nasty spoilsports who think that what got him through those august institutions with his "gentleman's Cs" was the same thing that got him into them, which had nothing to do with books.

When you get down to it, the one question I can think of that's worth asking about the bogus reading list is: Why on earth have the Bush handlers created and then continued to feed this preposterous illusion of "W the Readin' Fool"?

Maureen Dowd got me thinking about it again in her NYT column yesterday. I'm not sure she did much more than lay some useful groundwork, but that's something:

'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. W., the most simple, unreflective and Manichaean of men, communing with Will, the most subtle, reflective and myriad-minded of men.

Under Laura the Librarian's tutelage, the president is discovering the little black dress of 60's education, as one scholar referred to the president's summer reading list of "The Stranger," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth."

Mr. Bush's bristly distaste for the intellectual elite has been so much a part of his persona, from Yale on, that it's hard to wrap one's mind around a heavy W., steeped in French existentialism and Elizabethan tragedy.

On the 2000 campaign trail, W. told me that he did not identify with any literary hero, that baseball was his favorite "cultural experience," and that he liked "John La Care, Le Carrier, or however you pronounce his name."

He was a gym rat, not a bookworm. He told Brit Hume in 2003 that he rarely read newspaper articles, preferring to get his information through aides, and he told Brian Lamb in 2005 that he would fall asleep after 20 or 30 pages of bedside reading.

But the first lady must have grown alarmed at seeing her husband mocked as a buff bubblehead wrapped in a bubble. She began giving interviews saying her man did too read newspapers, and she slipped W. some Camus and other serious fare.

Now already in this last paragraph I'm dubious. First off, with regard to this notion of our Chimpy as "a buff bubblehead," I've said it before and I'll say it again: For all of his compulsive running and supposed "working out," far from being "buff," he looks to me barely fit. While he may have achieved a certain cardiovascular fitness that's of course not visible to the naked eye, in terms of general physical fitness, I swear that an average seven-year-old girl could beat the stuffing out of him--and I'd pay to see it. (Isn't it often the case that compulsive behavior fails to produce the result that the compelled person hopes for?)

Then there's the notion that Mrs. Chimpy is the source of this illusion-of-literacy campaign. I don't doubt that her husband's philistinism is a persistent source of embarrassment to her, but it can hardly be news to her, can it? Wouldn't you think she has long since made peace with the unfortunate decision she made all those years ago? More to the point, is there any indication that our George has ever paid attention to or even truly heard a word that what's-her-name--you know, the library lady--has said, apart from that single instance of the time she made him give up drinking?

A far likelier candidate seems to me the coincidentally arrived White House press secretary, Tony Snow. A right-wing media thug he may be, but he's a media thug of infinitely more subtle persuasion than your garden-variety Limbaugh or Hannity or Coulter or O'Reilly.

Which still begs the original question: WHY??? After all these years of Chimpy's unrelenting, savage assault on everyone smarter than a Pet Rock, why do the people who pull his strings suddenly want to make it look as if their puppet is something other than a braying jackass?

I really don't have the answer. But the evidence certainly seems unmistakable that suddenly it has, well, become important to them. So why?

Let me throw out a theory.

For starters, let's be blunt and say something we're not supposed to say, because it's "elitist." Does anyone doubt that a primary source of Jackass George's popular appeal has been that he makes a lot of people think that he's just as dumb a pile of doody as they are--and we're gonna show all those smart-ass assholes who think they's smarter'n us who's the real pile of doody?

Perhaps the Bush handlers, despite their truly limitless contempt for the intelligence level of the American public, have seen too many chickens coming home to roost to continue trusting in American moronitude. Perhaps in year six of the farrago of criminality and incompetence known politely as the Bush administration, it is becoming impossible to disguise the unremittingly catastrophic results of its disastrous policies, or the fact that a lot of those goddamn smart asses warned on the record that those policies could only produce catastrophic results. Sure, the average American voter is a pig-brained ignoramus, the puppetmasters may be thinking, but what if he/she isn't quite that stupid?

Worst-case scenario: What happens if the AAV should put one and one together and get two--make the connection between policies that could only have been inflicted on them by a screeching ignoramus and, you know, the goon who's been screeching at them lo these many years? If those AAVs get the sense that they've been hoodwinked, that for all these years they've been wallowing in donkey doody with a braying jackass who took them for total fools, there could be a political price to be paid.

It's still a leap from there to the pathetic spectacle of Chimpy pretending to read Camus [left] and then debate the history of existentialism. (Um, by the way, what about the history of existentialism?) But I'm afraid it's the best I can do at the moment.

Almost the least preposterous thing about the idea of this apostle of moronitude claiming to have read The Stranger is that the book and the author are, after all, French. (Sacre bleu!) I'll bet there are millions of fetuses of unborn freedom fries rolling over in the cold-oil graves to which the fickle right-wing champions of freedom pulling W's strings have consigned them.


POSTSCRIPT REGARDING CHIMPY'S INTELLIGENCE LEVEL

This is a subject I find exceedingly tiresome, but it can't be avoided when we're talking about George W as a functional moron, which I sincerely believe he is. The key here is that word "functional": a functional moron.

I am not saying that W is stupid. What I am saying is something that in my mind is much worse: that he has deliberately chosen to live his life as if he is an ignoramus. Somewhere along the line, I believe he decided that actually using the brain he was endowed with (whether by evolution or by God, it doesn't matter) is too much trouble, or inconvenience, or fratboyish-not-funness, to be tolerated. He also discovered that he didn't have to tolerate it. Son of a gun, things worked out just peachy for him, maybe even peachier, if he left his brain on idle.

I hope you know the sublime Fawlty Towers episode--okay, all Fawlty Towers episodes are sublime, but this one is special even so--where Basil did battle with the formidable Mrs. Richards. I'm sure you remember Mrs. Richards [played by the late Joan Richardson, seen here with the infinitely put-upon Manuel, in the classic scene in which Manuel's "Si, 'que' 'what'" was transformed--in the tradition of "Who's on first?"--into the mythical hotel manager C. K. Watt]. She was the hideous hard-of-hearing crone who, it turned out, actually had a hearing aid that worked perfectly but refused to turn it on because she didn't want to wear down the battery.

That's the kind of feeling I get about our Chimpy's determination to avoid using his brain.

Do I have to spell out why this is, to me, much worse than if the creep was in fact brain-challenged? It's one thing for a person to try his best and come up against the limitation that his best just isn't good enough. It's quite another thing for a person to say, "Frig it, I don't gotta try. Everything's just gonna work out peachy for me." Only Ivy League-type elitists--you know, the kind of folks who earn their diplomas and don't let you forget it, even brag about using their brains--are likely to blow the whistle on you. Which may also explain W's lifelong hostility to everyone who has a working brain and the bad taste to use it.

Actually, there is yet one more layer of complexity to the situation.

I think it's possible that our Chimpy doesn't even know that he never uses his brain. I think when, for whatever reasons, he stopped using it, and saw no adverse consequences, he tricked himself into thinking that he was making better use of his brain, an illusion that the circumstances of his life conspired to allow him to hold onto.

This is the phenomenon that former Texas Gov. Ann Richards [right] described as George having being born on third base and thinking he hit a triple. The results have been catastrophic for the country. All those years when Chimpy's shady financial backers used him as a figurehead CEO for all those companies that promptly tanked under his "leadership," it appears that he actually thought he was a real CEO, building up a resume of "accomplishment" like his beloved Poppy's. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was managing not to notice that everything he touched turned to doody.

It wasn't hard for him to retain his delusion of competence as governor of Texas, because the governor of Texas doesn't do much of anything, and that's what our George does best. However, being a "CEO president of the United States" with that kind of track record as a make-believe CEO has been an all-too-predictable catastrophe for the country.

So perhaps his handlers think it's worth trying to "dress up the pig," or rather the jackass--as an existentialist.