I mulled over this book, Three Presidents and Their Books: The Reading of Jefferson, Lincoln, & F. D. Roosevelt, at a book store a few days back. I shrugged it off. Why Jefferson, Licoln, and FDR? Why not, say, Teddy Roosevelt?

Never mind. The books we associate with the current president are My Pet Goat, which isn’t really a book but is a story within a Reading Primer, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, his answer to a question of what his favourite kid’s book was/is, a book published when Bush attended Yale. (Maybe he read it to his kids, and liked it then? Who knows?) Then there’s that book on Acheson he said he was reading during the 2000 campaign, and when quizzed on stammered in a way suggesting that he obviously had not read it. And there’s Michael Crichton’s book of fiction, an attack on Global Warming that Bush praised as Science.

I looked over the Clearance pile of books. A lot of political books have a short shelf-life. It seems to be an obligation these days for a politico seeking the president to release a book just prior to his presidential campaign, and so what does one do with a book by Lamar Alexandar, or for that matter Dan Quayle?

But the books that I have to wonder about are, say, this:

Bush Country : How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane, by John Podhoretz.

Jee whiz, that book looks out of date these days. Can we tap our fingers at John Podhoretz and ask his thoughts on the “driving of liberals inane” with the “great president Dubya” these days? Oh how the Worm Turns! And churns.

Here are the great “crazy liberal ideas” that he dispels in this book:

#1: Bush is a moron. #2: Bush is a puppet. #3: Bush is a fanatic. #4: Bush is Hitler, only not as talented. #5: Bush isn’t protecting you. #6: Bush wants to bankrupt the government. #7: Bush is a cowboy. #8: Bush is a liar.

I thought Bush wanted you to think he was a cowboy. Or at least, he wanted the “red-staters” to think he was a cowboy.

Other than that… I’ve got nothing. I’m thinking of writing a long dissertation on Bush’s puppet-act, but…

Maybe I’ll wait for his approval rating to jump up to 35% before I do that. It seems like I’m just kicking at a corpse at this point in time.

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