BushQuotes!

Chapter 5, page 61: "I studied, and ran and rode my bike a lot. I was there to learn, and that's exactly what I did. The lessons were underscored when I visited my parents in China that summer. I'll never forget the contrast between what I learned about the free market at Harvard and what I saw in the closed isolation in China. Every bicycle looked the same."

There are more observations about how terrible China was because of its lack of a free market, but who cares. The more interesting thing to me is how he relates everything back to his own immediate experience. He rode his bike a lot...he noticed the uniformity of bikes in China. (Did he notice that, in China, way more people can afford those boring old bikes and live in communities built for bike access? Apparently not.) The entire world is assessed by how much it conforms with (GOOD!) or diverges from (BAD!) his experience. I have never witnessed a smaller mind in action.

[From George Bush's A Charge to Keep, gifted to me by Deeky, because he hates me. In the US, all people who plan to run for president write a shitty book. (Some are less shitty than others, by which I mean the Democrats' books.) A Charge to Keep was George W. Bush's shitty I-wanna-be-president book, published in 1999. I am blogging one random quote per page every day until I have either made my way through the book or lost it behind a couch.]