Uncurious George

Issues | Citations | Links | About us

Explained | Dishonorable Mentions | Other Georges | Uncurious media

Citations: Dishonorable mentions
Mentions of George Bush as uncurious, without explanation

Listed newest to oldest

American Thinker: A Lump of Coal for Kwanzaa
December 30, 2006
By Selwyn Duke

Ah, Incurious George, the great defender of our culture.

Coming Perfect Storm
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Posted by Computer Bruce at 2:41 PM

Bush is not seeking, analytically, a way to change things in Iraq. Being a bit stunted intellectually, by a lifetime of laziness and incuriousity, he probably never concerned himself with such an analysis. He delegated that job. He's looking for a political narrative, which doesn't involve admitting that he has failed, miserably, in the principal enterprise of his Presidency.

Letters: Mixed views on Iraq war | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle
Dec. 28, 2006

His time to retire

. . . The reporter was really trying to find out whether Bush understands the situation at this moment; whether or not he truly understands where we are and what this war is costing our nation in what matters most: the lives of young people.

This is a legitimate question of an incurious president who up until this point seemed proud of the fact that he doesn't read newspapers or watch the news.

IGNACIO CARRION Houston

A locked Cabinet - The Boston Globe
By H.D.S. Greenway | December 26, 2006
Also appeared in the International Herald Tribune December 27 as Bush's losing team and in The Day (New London, CT) December 30 as President George Bush's Locked Cabinet.

Stubbornly incurious and utterly convinced in the rightness of his instincts over sober consideration and evidence, what seemed at first a virtue of steadfastness after 9/11 is now revealed as a terrible failure of leadership, and a near total lack of accountability.

The Zeitgeist Checklist By MICHAEL Grunwald - washingtonpost.com
The Washington Post
Sunday, December 24, 2006; Page B02
Also appeared in Slate Dec. 22, 2006.

Taking the indulgence of the American consumer to its logical extreme, Time magazine selects You as its Person of the Year. Never before has the Person of the Year spent so much time sitting around the house in his underwear, eating Cheetos and watching "Flavor of Love." Seriously, some experts believe Time hasn't chosen anyone this inept, incurious and clueless about the outside world since 2004.

Yank in London: The perfect gift for (In)Curious George
23 December 2006
No excerpt, just the title.

D Magazine : The Front Burner
RE: BUSH LIBRARY
Paul Kix · December 21, 2006 07:40 PM

To the FBvian: if you think our country's most incurious leader will provide SMU academic prestige, well, great. I don't.

Shakespeare's Sister
Reason #1,339,862 that McCain Shouldn't Be President
| posted by Shakespeare's Sister | Thursday, December 21, 2006

Bush surrounded himself with cretins, cronies, and yes-men, and look at how that turned out. No doubt McCain considers himself beyond the pitfalls to which Bush has succumbed, because McCain is inarguably more knowledgeable and thusly less dependent on aides and advisors than the ill-prepared, excruciatingly unqualified, and chronically incurious dopesack that beat him. But what of the men and women with whom he surrounds himself just to get there...?

Evil and the Oval Office: A Spiritual, but also Naturalistic, Perspective on the Bushite Regime
OpEdNews.com
December 21, 2006 at 10:58:14
by Andrew Bard Schmookler

And when an ignorant and incurious man with a bully's love of swagger and of humiliating his enemies and rivals presented himself as a potential "commander-in-chief" whom they might command, the forces of evil working through such broken men broke through all restraint to become a global bully.

The Portland Freelancer: Presidential Profiling
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
posted by Bill McDonald @ 8:16 AM

His profound lack of curiosity in the world could stem from a realization that there's something missing in his own soul and he knows it.

Will the Next Leader Please Stand Up?
OpEdNews.com
December 16, 2006 at 11:52:25

Now, let's address "the presidential look." That this is a factor is beyond absurd. Give me a bald and overweight, yet, inquisitive, intelligent, and decent president any day over a bike-riding, physically-fit, word-mangling, language-challenged, incurious moron.

Drudge Retort: O'Donnell: The Study Group is a Surrender Plan
Posted by tonyroma at 2006-12-15 05:17 PM

I've said from the beginning, Bush is an incurious person, and this incuriousness has led him not to ask "what if" questions before leaping into a situation without having accounted for all contingencies.

The Woodbury Democrat: Bush In Wonderland
12/15/2006

Previously, I have described Bush as incurious. In light of more recent events, I’d have to admit I was way too kind.

. . . because the Study Group did not return with news agreeable to the administration, the latter dismissed the report out of hand.

Impeachable Treason: What Would Jesus Want Bush To Do?
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Includes a 1:44 video of Al Gore discussing George Bush's incuriosity

Some say stupid, some say peevish, some say petty, but pretty much everyone agrees that one thing George Bush is, is incurious: . . .

Will he "get curiosity" and start asking hard questions and learning hard lessons about the havoc his policies have wreaked?

recordonline.com - Cramming on Iraq ...
The Times Herald-Record, serving New York's Hudson Valley and the Catskills
December 13, 2006

Title: "A Christmas Story." A fantasy set in the nation's capital. Starring George W. Bush as himself. With a stellar supporting cast of familiar faces. Produced and directed by Karl Rove and Tony Snow.

Plot summary: A self-proclaimed incurious president famous for taking no one's counsel other than his own embarks on a three-day crash course, meeting with every conceivable expert on the face of the earth, ostensibly to develop a new course of action for a disastrous war he started on a whim and a wish.

Stonefruit: Reality check ahead
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
posted by stonefruit at 8:10 PM

Bush may be totally incurious about almost every aspect of public policy, but he is really interested in torture at "secret" CIA prisons.

Alter: Bush's Shortcomings Lead to Iraq Miscues - Newsweek Between the Lines - MSNBC.com
Trouble From the Top Down
By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek
Dec. 18, 2006 issue
First observed by uncuriousgeorge.org on December 11, 2006.

This is what happens when you have a president who is incurious and impatient with inconvenient facts he doesn't "need to know": hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, nearly 3,000 dead Americans and what the Baker-Hamilton Commission estimates as a $2 trillion tab for our children.

Capitol Hill Blue: Is Karl Rove about to get the Bush boot?
Posted by: ADB | December 11, 2006 9:20 AM

Hiding in plain sight is the reality that this singularly incurious President drank his own Kool-Aid. Bush is notorious for shooting messengers; and Rove equally notorious for bending reality to serve his master's political will.

McCain is wrong « The Theroxylandr in Flame
Mon 11 Dec 2006
Posted by theroxylandr

Bush is very un-diplomatic person and also stubborn and “intellectually incurious”.

Fresno California Liberal
Saturday, December 09, 2006
BUSH'S LACK OF CURIOSITY NOT FUNNY

George W. Bush's lack of intellect has provided fodder for late night comedians. But his lack of curiosity isn't funny. The leader of the world's most powerful nation should be curious. He or she should be able to add something to the dialogue about important policy decisions. He or she should care enough about their job to get all the available information about issues like war and the economy.

Joho the Blog: Worst. President. Ever?
Posted by D. Weinberger at December 9, 2006 10:06 AM

Personality: Stubborn. Incurious. Not fact-based. Non-nuanced. Incapable of seeing multiple points of view. Believes he knows what God wants. . . .

Anti-science

Rounder6: DADDY BAKER AND THE BOYS
Saturday, December 09, 2006
posted by William Clark at 1:09 PM

Maybe at the minimalist least the iSG will prove more cover to the duplicitous media who goosestepped into Iraq right along side the neocons(though stationed in studios and think-tanks), who shied away from telling the plain truth most of them knew about ground zero in Iraq way before uncurious George ever got the word

Wirearchy :: God's Conversations With Bush ...
by jonh on Sat 09 Dec 2006 11:18 PM PST

You'd only have to be as unintelligent or incurious as GW to believe that inspiration about issue that are confronting you is a direct message from God.

Bad signs about Rep. Reyes « Later On
12.09.06

The new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Silvestre Reyes, doesn’t seem to know the first thing about Al Qaeda and the forces we’re fighting—and this is possible only if he’s as absolutely incurious as George Bush.

Musings of a (Fairly) Young Contrarian: How failure became self-sustaining
posted by Brian @ Friday, December 08, 2006

I've always said that the greatest flaw of George W. Bush's governing style is not the policies he advocates, as disastrous as they are. It's not his alleged lack of intelligence. The greatest flaws in his governing style are his lack of curiosity, his preference for personal loyalty over truth and the greater good, his disinterest in or outright hostility toward hearing differing points of view.

While many on the left smugly and with great self-satisfaction focus on Bush's alleged intellectual and mental deficiencies, they're missing the point. Cheney is, by all accounts, an extremely intelligent man. But he suffers from the very same character flaw as Bush: not wanting their opinions challenged.

This administration has created a culture that prized 'yes' men above all else; that rewarded loyalty over competence; that viewed the admissions of the slightest failing to be almost treasonous against the person of Mr. Bush.

Any administration is going to make mistakes, because they are made up of fallible humans. But an open-minded administration will be open enough to new ideas to correct their mistakes. In a closed-minded culture like the Bush administration, they don't even acknowledge the mistakes in the first place so they can't fix them. In the absence of such corrective measures, failure becomes self-sustaining.

Times Argus: Vermont News & Information
The Barre Montpelier Times Argus
Editorials
A stern warning
December 8, 2006

It was this swaggering president with his singularly shallow intellect and a breathtaking lack of curiosity who got us into this mess.

The Blog | Cenk Uygur: The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush | The Huffington Post
12.08.2006
Also appeared on Yahoo! News and The Smirking Chimp.

Lawrence Eagleburger is a Republican. He was the Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush and was a prominent figure in the Reagan administration. He is a party stalwart and one of the bastions of the Republican establishment. This man obviously wants George W. Bush to succeed. When he met with President Bush, along with all of the members of the Iraq Study Group, he said that after they presented their findings - Bush asked no questions.

Eagleburger remarked, "I don't recall, seriously, that he asked any questions."

Stop. Think about that for a second. There are 79 recommendations made by the group. They took nine months and talked to everyone involved about the situation in Iraq. They have interesting, sometimes controversial positions, some of which Bush theoretically agrees and disagrees with - and he asked absolutely no questions. Not one.

That is beyond unbelievable. You would have to be stupendously stupid, mentally stultified and intellectually inoperative not to be able to come up with one question to this group who has presented the most important report of your presidency to you. . . .

Remember the famous meeting before Hurricane Katrina where federal officials warned that the levees might not hold. His response? Not one question.

Remember what Paul O'Neill, the former Treasury Secretary, said about him during their first one-on-one meeting. After O'Neill spoke for an hour about all of the important budgetary and domestic issues in the country, he turned to the president. His response? Not one question.

Remember when he received the Presidential Daily Briefing warning "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." His response? Not one question. But in this case, to rub salt into the wounds, he added to the CIA official giving the dire warnings, "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

Wow.

His contempt for and ignorance of the necessities of the job are stunning. At first when Michael Moore made a big deal about how President Bush read "My Pet Goat" for seven minutes after he was told the nation was under attack, I thought he was being a bit unfair.

I thought at the time that Bush was thinking about what to do and didn't want to freak out the kids by rushing out of the room. But now the weight of experience leads me to realize that it was no such thing. The tiny wheels inside that vacuous mind were turning and churning, and in the end he had nothing to show for it. Zip. He had no idea what to do.

He didn't ask Andy Card who attacked us? What hit the buildings? What precautions we should take? What actions and reactions we should engage in immediately? How do we go about defending ourselves? What's happening on the ground in New York?

When he was told we were under attack on 9/11, what was his response? Not one question.

Letters: Hell, let's call it a week - Salon
Tim Grieve [2006-12-07]

The Presidency with Training Wheels

. . . And now we need a committee of adults to convene and produce a little book to help incurious George out of the mess he got (us) into.

-- S.P. Goldman

The Last Chance Democracy Cafe » Blog Archive » Gore: Iraq is Worst Strategic Mistake in History of U.S.
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006

Sadly, Bush is so intellectually incurious, I’d bet when Bush is the butt of an intelligent joke, he never really understands what everyone is laughing about and starts to laugh along with them, causing everyone else to laugh just a little bit harder.

Hurrah for Karamazov!: Leave No Child Left Behind Behind
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
posted by micahd @ 2:34 PM

I've always asked myself what my reaction to No Child Left Behind would have been had it been passed by President Gore (if only!) and a Democratic Congress. That's a tough counterfactual, though, because that legislation may have been much better designed and implemented. The incuriousness of the Bush Administration as it relates to the effectiveness of certain policies is legendary although there were many lefties who helped design at least the initial iterations of this one.

MONDAY'S LETTERS: Soldier's Suicide, 'Worst President Ever,' Ephron and Will
Published: December 04, 2006 11:30 AM ET

Everything about him is anti-presidential: his low intellect, his incuriousness, his indifference, his inarticulateness, his ironic lack of compassion, the calling card of his first term, that was glaringly exposed as nonexistent after Hurricane Katrina, his attack on 200 plus years of American democracy through the Patriot Act, his championing of internal spying, the suspension of habeas corpus and arresting of U.S. citizens labeled as enemy combatants without right to counsel, all pile up as indictments of his presidency and his administration and their appalling flaws.

Brian Symonanis
Oak Park, Ill.

He's The Worst Ever - washingtonpost.com
The Washington Post
By Eric Foner
Sunday, December 3, 2006; Page B01

At a time of national crisis, Pierce and Buchanan, who served in the eight years preceding the Civil War, and Johnson, who followed it, were simply not up to the job. Stubborn, narrow-minded, unwilling to listen to criticism or to consider alternatives to disastrous mistakes, they surrounded themselves with sycophants and shaped their policies to appeal to retrogressive political forces (in that era, pro-slavery and racist ideologues). Even after being repudiated in the midterm elections of 1854, 1858 and 1866, respectively, they ignored major currents of public opinion and clung to flawed policies. Bush's presidency certainly brings theirs to mind.

Silly Humans
Sunday, December 03, 2006

(un)Curious George

Centauromachy - The great task of our generation
December 3rd, 2006 (07:00 pm)

Now, both the officials whose infighting and lack of curiosity got us into this mess, and the American people, are looking for a story to tell ourselves about the war.

The Uniter: The Peace Dividend Redux
December 3, 2006 at 08:29:44

Bush has been fodder for the pundits from his first inaugural ceremony what with his linguistically challenged rhetoric, his faux folksy stance, and his curious lack of curiosity.

Scatablog: Incurious George
Saturday, December 02, 2006

Our dear leader has rejected the Iraq Study Group recommendations before he's even heard them:

Rolling Back the Tide of Extremism, One Post at a Time: Pity POTUS
Friday, December 01, 2006

There was an intellectual vacuum to George Bush born out of the union of a lack of curiosity combined with a lack of accomplishment.

AMERICAblog: A blog for a great nation that deserves the truth
by Joe in DC - 12/01/2006 09:49:00 AM

Bush's problems extend way beyond lack of curiosity.

Bush, Maliki and That Memo - New York Times
Editorial
Published: December 1, 2006

Mr. Bush’s lack of curiosity was well known even before he became president, but as time has gone on and bad news has mounted, that disinterested quality has turned into a stubborn refusal to hear bad news. The country simply cannot afford it any longer. Three years of having Mr. Bush trust only his gut has plunged Iraq into bloody chaos and done untold damage to America.

Please contact webmaster to suggest new citations or report bad links.

Uncurious George

Citations: Dishonorable mentions Mentions of George Bush as uncurious, without explanation

Citations: Dishonorable mentions
Mentions of George Bush as uncurious, without explanation