Literary Bushit

The White House claims that George W. Bush has read SIXTY books this year - so far. Apparently, he's started a book-reading contest with Karl Rove (beats an indictment-receiving contest, right?) and he's up on Turd Blossom by 10. Here's a partial list from the White House.

As this post points out, it is impossible that W has read sixty books. I myself have undertaken the 50 book challenge for 2006, and so far, after really putting some effort into it, and enjoying a two-week vacation in Thailand/Cambodia where I knocked off 8 books in a hurry, I have only read 37 books so far. To be honest, some of those were selected (and toughed out in instances where I would normally quit) precisely because of their brevity (although I certainly have a few 500+ pagers in there too - including this beast). And while I have a full-time job, orchestrated a wedding party, and spend a lot of time writing, I'm certainly not burdened by too much, like kids or leading the world.

And then there's the obvious: Bush doesn't like to read the paper, much less books. He can't form a complete sentence on his own. He's demonstrated the intellectual curiosity of a worm.

Let's crunch the numbers on the reading list (or, better yet, let's steal them from somebody who's better at math):

Of the twelve books listed, I come up with a total page count of 5,356 pages, including 1,585 pages not available until at least 4/2006 of this year. That is an average page count of 450 pages per book. Multiply by his 60 books so far this year for a total page count of 27,000. 27,000 pages means the President would have to average a little over 115 pages per day. Reading a quick pace of a little over a minute per page, that is two hours a day of reading, and let's be honest, longer if you want to retain information in these types of books. And this from a man who prides himself in not reading the paper. I don't buy it.

Now in elementary school we had something called the MS Readation (the MS is for Multiple Sclerosis, not Microsoft or Matt Stewart). I lined up some sponsors and then collected donations to fight MS for each book I read. In a couple of months I think I put down something like 110 books.

Those books were short and they were easy. But I definitely skimmed a couple dozen. While that was a little dishonest, bear in mind that 1) I was raising money to beat a lethal disease and 2) All the other nerds in my class were going at a ferocious pace and I had to keep up. Also, there may have been some sort of reward/stickers at stake.

W, on the other hand, is just trying to pretend he's smart. He's clearly lying here (but what else is new?). This disingenuous claim is representative of the administration, their war on Iraq, their war on the lower class. And somebody should call him on it.

Unless, of course, he's just rereading his favorite goat book. It looks like a pretty quick read.

(On the scary front, reading and cycling, Bush's other free-time fave, are MY top two hobbies as well. Bush may be a bad president, but he'd be a cool dude to hang with.)