Monday, August 27, 2007

Bush "under-educated" says NPR Talk Show Host


Brian Lehrer, the host of the The Brian Lehrer Show (On WNYC, an NPR affiliate), made quite an off hand comment this morning about president Bush. It may have been worded poorly, it may have been unintentional, or it may have been a Freudian slip:

Lehrer:

...Let's begin with Bush on Vietnam, what an odd thing to bring up.

[After playing a clip from president Bush's Iraq/Vietnam speech last week]:

Lehrer:

Is this another example of president Bush being kind of under-educated, or not realizing the impact of his words, thinking he could make that kind of ideological remark, if you can call it that, without having historians and politicians jump all over him?

Hmm... Yale and Harvard degrees, one should be so unfortunate.

This comment, unsurprising as it is coming from NPR, does not go very far toward the show's description on WNYC, of a "sane alternative" in talk radio.

Lastly, if Lehrer did some research, he would find that many historians happen to agree with the president's assessment of a dangerous parallel between Iraq and Vietnam: Vietnam historians give Bush reason to stay in Iraq. Brian Lehrer seems under-educated on this fact.

Not to mention that both Jonn Kerry and James Webb, critics of Bush's comparison, have compared Iraq to Vietnam when it suited their political agenda.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Umm, yeah, but when Kerry compares Iraq to Vietnam he is saying "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?".

When Bush compares Iraq to Vietnam, he thinks the mistake was that American men ever stopped dying for it.

Anonymous said...

... not that I'm American, or was alive during Vietnam, or even like John "Inanimate Block of Wood" Kerry...

I'm just sayin' maybe NPR ain't so wacky, and the draft dodger who called the war hero a traitor got some of his history wrong on the war he dodged.

Anonymous said...

... oh yeah, and the Yale and Harvard degrees? Not exactly top of his class, was he? Even I can get a 'C' in basket weaving.

Not that I'm one to talk, but then I'm not relying on my education to, um, lead almost 300 million people directly and the rest of the world indirectly.

Well... maybe one day.

Paul Allen said...

Anonymous(s),

Kerry wasn't mistake free - meeting with the enemy, throwing another Vet's medals over a fence in "protest," and citing fellow soldiers for war crimes while promoting himself.

I don't agree that Bush thinks the mistake was that Americans stopped dying, rather that by leaving we gave up victory, admitted defeat, handed Vietnam to Russia/China, and tacitly admitted all the Americans who died wasted their lives.

Anonymous 2 - I listen to NPR every day, and I enjoy it, but they are wacky.

And it's not that he got his history wrong, the host only presented that view, ignoring historians who agree with him.

Anonymous 3 - Good luck on your presidential aspirations. In the mean time, notice the misconstrued vocabulary used by Lehrer.

Bush may be a poor learner, crude, bad with words, less than articulate. But characerizing someone has "under-educated" is flat out incorrect.

Not to mention the inherent partisan swipe the name-calling is meant to inflict.

It's a classic tactic by individuals who either can't argue based on the merits of the facts, or who choose not to: denigrate the object through ad hominem attacks and distract from the argument.