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“Such A Curious Mind”

But I think people caricatured the president, and the only thing that I couldn’t understand is why this man with such a curious mind, who in briefings always asked the question you wish you thought of, why that quality didn’t come across. And I fully admit that it didn’t come across. ~Condoleeza Rice I suppose […]

But I think people caricatured the president, and the only thing that I couldn’t understand is why this man with such a curious mind, who in briefings always asked the question you wish you thought of, why that quality didn’t come across. And I fully admit that it didn’t come across. ~Condoleeza Rice

I suppose it’s possible that George W. Bush could have had “such a curious mind” and still made all the terrible decisions that he did, but one of the reasons that he received a reputation for being incurious is that he overlooked such obvious, glaring flaws in his administration’s policies that someone with “such a curious mind” should have noticed. He wasn’t very good at demonstrating that he knew or cared to know very much about things. If Bush were as curious as Rice claims, he did an amazing job of hiding it.

The example of Rice provides Bush with an easy way out. After all, she was widely considered to be extremely intelligent, well-informed, and a “student of history,” as her admirers kept telling everyone, and she went along with the very same profoundly destructive, misguided, ruinous policies. She was supposed to have expertise on Russia, and her tenure as Secretary of State coincided with the worst period of U.S.-Russian relations since the Cold War. Curiosity or lack of it doesn’t make much of a difference if a person has incredibly poor judgment or holds deeply flawed ideological assumptions about the world. The worrisome thing about Bush is that he might very well have been a curious, inquisitive person and still come to the same wrong conclusions.

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