NationStates Jolt Archive


W. Kan reed.

_Susa_
17-08-2004, 01:58
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/kessler200408160836.asp


Bush Mythology
The Left has an unrealistic read on President Bush.

By Ronald Kessler

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece was originally set to appear as an op-ed in USA Today. According to Ronald Kessler, the op-ed was accepted by USA Today back in July, to run to coincide with the publication of his new book A Matter of Character. The piece, however, wound up not running last week, and was eventually killed by USAT. A spokesman for the paper told The O'Reilly Factor late last week, "Mr. [Brian] Gallagher had questions about the piece that couldn't be resolved with Mr. Kessler, so we didn't run the column."

Ronald Kessler, however, says: "To say that Brian Gallagher, the editor of the editorial page, had questions that I couldn't resolve is misleading. Gallagher had objections — not questions — that were so obtuse that John Siniff, the Forum editor who had approved the op-ed to run the next day, said he could not understand them. Still hoping he could run the piece, Siniff therefore asked me to speak to Mr. Gallagher directly. When I did so, Gallagher said he did not think the op-ed made a persuasive case that the caricatures of George Bush as a dimwit were wrong. In supporting that claim, he said a favorable quote about how Bush conducted his own research into why kids can't read from Alexander "Sandy" Kress was suspect because Kress was pro-Bush. As it happens, Kress is a former chair of the Dallas County Democratic party. But Mr. Gallagher's clear implication was that anyone who has a favorable opinion of Bush is not credible."

Kessler's publicist, Sandy Schulz, further explained to NRO: "The ultimate rejection of the piece by Kessler, whose three op-eds on CIA subjects had run unscathed in the past three months, coupled with Gallagher's point that a quote from a pro-Bush person is not credible, clearly demonstrates the anti-Bush media bias Kessler documents in his book. "

If you believe the media and the recent spate of books about George W. Bush, the president has a short attention span — yet from the day he took office he was obsessed with attacking Iraq. He is a puppet of Dick Cheney or Karl Rove, but he does not listen to anyone's advice. His decisions are made for him by warring factions within his administration, but he stubbornly clings to his own views. He graduated from Yale and Harvard Business School, but is a dimwit. He appointed Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice to two of the most powerful positions in the government, but is an intolerant right-winger.


If the caricatures are conflicting, they are also wrong. For my biography of Bush, I interviewed his close friends going back to Andover and Yale as well as the key players in his administration — White House chief of staff Andrew Card, political guru Karl Rove, national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, counsel Alberto Gonzales, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and others. Yet some of the most telling illustrations of what Bush is really like emerged from interviews with people most have never heard of.

Barnett "Sandy" Kress, a lawyer and former Democratic member of the Dallas school board, told me how, when he was only thinking about running for governor, Bush became interested in why so many kids couldn't read and what could be done about it. Bush asked Kress dozens of questions: What are the best ways to teach reading? What are other states doing? Taking notes on a legal pad, Bush wanted to know who had studied the issue. Kress mentioned six experts in the field.

"People think he shoots from the hip or that he's not smart," Kress said. "It baffles me.... He was an incredible student of these issues. He had a voracious appetite for information. He looked into the problem and researched it.... I gave him six names. He called them all. They were as stunned as I was."

If Kress was amazed, Dr. G. Reid Lyon, a reading expert at the National Institutes of Health, was even more astonished when he answered his phone in Rockville, Maryland, in 1995 and was told the governor of Texas was calling. Bush had heard that Lyon, a research psychologist and former teacher, had studied the reading problem and had found that a faddish approach to teaching kids to read was behind the poor reading scores. Introduced in the 1970s, the whole-language method held that the traditional, phonics-based method of teaching kids to sound out letters — "a" has the sound of "ay" as in "bay," or "ah" as in cat — is boring. Instead, nutty as it sounds, under the whole-language approach, kids were taught to read by simply giving them books and expecting that they would become so enthralled that they would figure out the words themselves. Essentially, that meant kids were not being taught to read at all.

Today, an unbelievable 40 percent of fourth graders cannot read a simple children's book. The non-teaching method of whole language is particularly hard on minorities. Nationally, 65 percent of black fourth graders and 59 percent of Hispanic fourth graders cannot read a simple children's book. Without being able to read even driving directions, they face a lifetime of failure.

Based on Lyons's advice, Bush developed a way to restore phonics to reading instruction in Texas. The results were dramatic. In 1995, 23 percent of third graders could not read. By 2003, that figure had improved to ten percent, according to state testing figures compiled by Kress, who became Bush's unpaid education adviser. After additional help for kids who failed, only two percent could not read. The greatest beneficiaries of restoring phonics to reading instruction — which includes work on comprehension, spelling, and actual reading — were minorities.

When Bush became president, he tried to do the same thing nationally through the No Child Left Behind Act. Under the law, local school systems receive federal money for reading programs if they adopt teaching methods that have been scientifically proven to work. Based on NIH-supported research on more than 44,000 students, that method is phonics.

Despite the law, because of foot dragging by teachers and their unions which resist change, sixty percent of school systems continue to teach whole language. Rather than use a method that works, New York City stubbornly clings in the vast majority of its schools to what is essentially a whole-language approach, turning out hundreds of thousands of illiterate kids over the years. Yet I found that the toniest private schools in New York — the Collegiate, Brearley, St. David's, and Dalton schools — all use phonics to teach reading.

"Of course we teach phonics," Beth Tashlik, the head of the Collegiate School's lower school, told me. "You can't teach reading without it."

Ironically, unless they are wealthy and send their kids to private schools, New York liberals who most oppose Bush are the ones whose kids cannot read because their own public schools resist Bush's efforts to restore phonics to reading instruction.

Unlike Bush, the media rarely dig into the subject.

"Nobody wants to write the real story of why kids can't read," Margaret Spellings, Bush's domestic policy adviser, told me. "I don't know if it's too hard." Indeed, caricatures are far easier to create.

"It is amazing to me that Bush is thought of as a right winger who doesn't care about minorities," Lyon said. "He saved so many of their lives."
Peopleandstuff
17-08-2004, 06:06
This post is so funny, talk about faulty reasoning.
If you believe the media and the recent spate of books about George W. Bush, the president has a short attention span — yet from the day he took office he was obsessed with attacking Iraq.
Aha, and of course many many people who have short attention spans are obsessed with things. Attention span refers of course to one's ability to focus very narrowly on a particular task for a period of time. Obsession refers to a tendancy to centre one's perception in relation to a certain concept, thing or issue. In fact being obsessed with something increases the liklihood of having a short attention span, since the ability to focus very narrowly on a particular task is obviously interferred with when an individual has a tendancy to centre perception on a particular concept, thing or issue, since that tendancy distracts the individual from the particular task that requires their narrow (ie undivided) attention.

He is a puppet of Dick Cheney or Karl Rove, but he does not listen to anyone's advice.
Knowing how to best manipulate someone who prefers not to listen to advice (and in fact in Bush's case it is more accurate to suggest that he doesnt listen to advice that contradicts his current perceptions), is simply a matter of determining their preferred beliefs.

His decisions are made for him by warring factions within his administration, but he stubbornly clings to his own views.
I dont know about the warring factions part, but I suggest that his decisions are manipulated by people who are well aware that Bush's perception of the world leaves him particularly vulnerable to thier preferred methodologies. Bush's 'own views' are in fact what makes him such a soft target for these people. In presenting their views to Bush, they mirror his own image of the world. It is not contrary to assume that a group of people who's preferred plan of action fits with Bush's 'own views' could not manipulate him, in fact it would illogical to suggest otherwise.

He graduated from Yale and Harvard Business School, but is a dimwit.
I dont see why a dimwit should not be able to graduate from a business school. The fact is academics is about doing certain things, and with enough help anyone can do those things. Clearly some people require less assistance than others. Further many people who are very capable of completing academic tasks are still utterly stupid. Case in point, one of the highest adademic achievers in a class I was once in was so stupid, she actually believed that if you attempted suicide you would suddenly know what the letters O.D. (over dose) stand for. Another case in point, a universtity student who is doing very well in biological evolution, recently wrote a letter to the uni newspaper insisting that 'evolutionary deadends' were not part of nature because they contradict the purpose of evolution, despite the fact that in the same letter they stated all the information needed to realise that gene displacement (ie when a gene's frequency within a gene pool reaches 0) is a necessary aspect of the process called evolution.
Dimwits can and do get degrees.

He appointed Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice to two of the most powerful positions in the government, but is an intolerant right-winger.
And again not contrary. One can be right wing, and intertolerent and still have Condoleezza Rice in powerful positions within the government. Right-Wing does not mean racist and/or sexist, and neither does interolerent. I know many right wing intolerent people who are not white, are female and in some cases are not white and are female, so I dont imagine what Rice and Powell being in Bush's cabinet are supposed to prove...
If the caricatures are conflicting, they are also wrong.
They are not conflicting. At any rate when you get into human behaviour, confliction is not an abherration, but rather closer to the norm. Most of us are smart enough to work out that some people who are homosexual are disgusted by homosexuality, that most people who lie, dont like lies, that many people abhor murder, but would commit it to protect their children, that most people dont want to be fat, but many of these same people will sit on their behinds eating potatoe chips anyway.

As for the reading stuff, that kind of proves to me what an idiot he is. I have been against 'whole word recognition' from the moment I first was aware of it. It's obvious and requires no research to understand, (although some may be required to prove what is obvious to others). To sit around taking notes on a legal pad, is not proof of intelligence, but rather proof that one has access to a legal pad, and a writing implement. It does indicate at least basic literacy, but even with today's educational deficits, reading and writing and not considered to be signs of genius. Even stupid people can read and write, and many people who cant read and write and in fact very intelligent.

The fact that he has an appetite for information, does not mean anything with regards to his ability to manipulate the information to provide various conclusions and to test the conclusions, and confim, deny or adjust as required. The fact that he rung six people proves only that he can use a phone, as can most children who have a phone in their home.

As for restoring phonics, I doubt very much that Bush formulated a means of doing this. I suspect that he may have provided or made available funds for others to do this, but I really dont think he personally did it himself. Now I have to say that no one I know who learned to read phonetically (as Bush would have been taught) believe in the 'whole word recognition' system, outside of those 'educationalist professionals' who having bought into the mess are simply to egotistical to admit they were mistaken. Every parent I knows has despite the schools, taught phonics to their children at home and as it happens many teachers use this method regardless of the curriculum instructions. Why, because phonics is so obviously superior that it doesnt take a lot of smarts to realise this. Since the majority of people who have the information come to the same conclusion, (including some people I know who are frankly 'somewhat thick'), reaching such a conclusion does not prove that one is even averagely intelligent, rather to not realise such a thing proves that one has probably engaged in some fairly complex mental gymnastics, in order to avoid seeing the obvious.
In summary stupid people can and do get things right at least some of the time.
GrayFriars
17-08-2004, 06:12
The last one is stupid, but the others were listing the steryotypes.
Niccolo Medici
17-08-2004, 11:37
One post by the National Review, that decries one induvidual editor's "refusal" to run an op-ed piece is proof of vast biasies within the journalistic community. The article, which does not stumble over itself in its desperate attempts to curry favor with "pro-Bush" circles is most certainly not skewed, with such lines as,

"Unlike Bush, the media rarely dig into the subject."

"Ironically, unless they are wealthy and send their kids to private schools, New York liberals who most oppose Bush are the ones whose kids cannot read because their own public schools resist Bush's efforts to restore phonics to reading instruction."

Certainly this is clear, factual, and wholey relavant data, that could not possibly be misconstrued as fraudulent filth dregged up from some steaming cesspool of brown-nosing slime; fit only for lining birdcages and padding the walls of the mentally deranged.

Right? Pretty clear cut case of a brave and noble person who tried to run an op-ed piece and the horrible left-leaning editor wouldn't let him.