> One of my students asked “How involved was President Bush with what was going on?” I smiled and responded, “What you really mean is, ‘Was President Bush smart

> One of my students asked “How involved was President Bush with what was going on?” I smiled and responded, “What you really mean is, ‘Was President Bush smart enough to understand what was going on,’ right?” The class went dead silent. I hate this kind of self-centered storytelling. The "dead silence" is embellished for effect, and the author of the story makes the student asking the question into a crude idiot so he can have his comeuppance with the witty reframing. The odds of the events in question actually happening as describe are nearly zero. It makes the whole thing read like an email forward from a dumb aunt. When I think about the people in my own life that tell these kinds of stories, they're all awful to talk to. Every story involves them at the center of some otherwise anodyne situation where rooms full of people listen to them slack-jacked in awe of their perception and wit and charm. Drama comes almost exclusively by anonymous third parties being embarrassed by the repartee. Awful awful awful. That this particular piece takes that already deeply unattractive personal characteristic and applies it to the context of partisan politics is somehow even worse. The odds are that in the real story the majority of the students were borderline asleep, that the question asked was not a coded insult of Bush's intelligence but rather a curious student trying to learn about the division of intellectual labour in policy circles, and that the answer went over like a lead balloon because it involved evading the question to go on a moralistic lecture about how liberals are bad.