The Dyslexia of King George

George Bush repackages his failures as victories and hope nobody notices.

Often Bush’s ostentatious certainty is treated as an aspect of his confidence, arrogance, or religion.

But as the errors pile up and his evasions become ever more blatant, it’s time to consider alternate explanations.

Maybe he’s unwilling, afraid, or unable to manage the new information and handle the erupting uncertainties his job requires him to confront.

It’s time to revisit the issue of whether George Bush is dyslexic, and whether it materially affects his ability to perform his duties as president.

Rumors of Bush’s dyslexia were fed by his verbal clumsiness, but died out when he was able to work through his State of the Union addresses with a Teleprompter in an acceptable fashion.

But a dyslexic can screw himself up to perform such herculean tasks on an occasional basis when his public persona is at stake. And maybe he’s being prompted through an earpiece; I’m not sure about this but he seems to wear one frequently.

I have some personal experience with dyslexia in my family.

Even a mild case of dyslexia produces an aversion to the printed word.

In our overwhelmingly text-based society, dyslexia is considered a permanent handicap that can never be cured, but must be overcome through understanding and acceptance of the condition by the sufferer and his family, and ameliorated by careful, caring, and painstaking reinforcement of reading skills as they are slowly acquired. Care must be taken in choosing curriculum and careers in which dyslexia will not be a crippling disadvantage.

If the dyslexic feels that he doesn’t have a suitable support network and environment to manage the problem, he or she develops ad hoc, unhealthy, and secret coping strategies.

One is monomaniacal concentration on the limited range of written information that the dyslexic feels he can handle, fixedly concentrating on one tree to navigate through the disorienting forest — at the expense of comprehension and even recollection.

Another is to use tricks to limit the need to deal with the written word and hide the disability from peers and coworkers.

These strategies include reading-avoidance tricks such as “I’m too busy to read this; give me the gist of it” and “I’m not interested in what this report says; tell me what you think”; or, in the worst case, struggling through a few lines and then throwing it aside with the sabotaging statement “This is garbage. I’m not going to read any more of it.”

One school of thought considers dyslexia a gift, arguing that the inability to read fluently is actually a sign of the creativity of a brain that can is continually apprehending and attempting to process information from many visual and conceptual perspectives at once, instead of limiting itself to the single-track acceptance of printed symbols on a page.

Dyslexics can become effective executives, relying on their unique perspective to analyze and conceptualize problems in elaborate structures while organizing and encouraging a flow of properly processed information to them from subordinates largely in oral form.

However, a dysfunctional dyslexic executive will overrely on an “instinctive” leadership as opposed to an analytic, data-based approach to issues and cripple his organization instead of restructuring it to fit his needs by dismissing or avoiding information and situations that expose him to the stress of dealing with the written word.

So let’s look at George W. Bush, possible dyslexic.

Dyslexia runs in the family. His older brother, Neil, has it; so does his nephew. Business Week looked into the issue of Bush’s malapropisms from another angle, asked the White House if Bush has a listening disorder and got a non-denial denial.

Dyslexics often flourish in environments requiring visual acquisition and creative processing of information, becoming surgeons or pilots. George W. Bush, after scoring in the bottom quartile of his (presumably written) aptitude test, by most reports went on to become a reasonably skilled pilot in his otherwise less than glorious years of service in the Texas National Guard.

Josh Marshall quotes from a favorable description of the President’s reading habits from a forthcoming book:

Meathead, moron, or somebody secretly and acutely stressed and “frustrated” by the demands of dealing with the printed word and the complex of ideas it attempts to convey?

The group of “half a dozen aides” - and Laura! - tasked with reducing the news to digestible and ignorable facts looks like an ad hoc support network that Bush has cobbled together to make sure he doesn’t have to face the struggle of reading a newspaper…any newspaper…even USA Today.

This description of how Bush manages to filter out any news coverage that clashes with his firmly-held beliefs is not reassuring, especially when one considers that the best plausible explanation is closed-mindedness and the worst is that he is incapable of processing new data or ideas if they are presented in written form.

What actually got me thinking about this seriously after reading Marshall’s post was recalling Bush’s puzzling comment this year dismissing the famous August 6, 2001 Daily Briefing entitled “Bin-Ladin Determined to Strike inside US”:

But the PDB, dismissed as a wet squib instead of smoking gun, is pretty alarming — and damning.

It describes one actual conspiracy — the Millennium Plot, which “may have been part of Bin Ladin's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US” - already thwarted, and goes on to conclude (at least in the suspiciously Cliff Notes version released to the public):

Did Bush really read the brief? Did he mis-read it? Or was there a mismatch of Bush’s ability to absorb information and the system meant to deliver it to him?

Thanks to Mark Rothschild for Antiwar.com, we can learn something of the context of the PDBs.

For instance, according to Sidney Blumenthal, Bush doesn’t read these briefings, but receives oral synopses from CIA Director George Tenet.

In background briefings spinning the release of the PDB, in response to a question as to whether he had actually read it: .

And we learn that George Tenet was not in Crawford on August 6 during one of Bush’s innumerable vacations. The briefing had to be conducted by a lower-level CIA grunt who presumably did not have Tenet’s experience in or devotion to pounding facts into the president’s ear so they stick to Bush’s brain while simultaneously covering Tenet’s ass, or the precious Condi’s gift for engaging and rewarding our Pres’s wayward attention.

On a hot day after a grueling four-mile run (physical and mental fatigue exacerbates dyslexia and further degrades reading performance), loath to face the daunting, disorienting text of the briefing book, and deprived of the comforting, accustomed support network that shields him and compensates for his inadequacies, maybe Bush tuned out.

Maybe all he heard was some anxious CIA punk going on about bin Laden…blah blah blah…same old same old.

So I think Bush’s possible dyslexia is a suitable and important area of inquiry.

If Bush can’t absorb written information comfortably — but has not structured his organization to provide the information he needs in a timely, reliable, and accessible manner — he’s putting this country at risk.

Maybe we hit the trifecta here: a president who is dyslexic, in denial about it, and defiantly unwilling to recognize and compensate for his problems.

Bad for him; worse for the country.