Smirking for Profit

Mark Morford tries to resolve the "Is Bush Stupid?" conundrum (snippet):

....So then. You gotta admit, maybe Bush isn't all that stupid after all. Maybe he's not the smirking aww-shucks born-again simpleton he constantly appears to be, the one who sits back and lets his henchmen do all the dirty work and all the complex thinking while he lets Condi Rice massage his ego and fill him in at the ranch while taking more vacation time than any other president in history. Or, rather, maybe Dubya really is that stupid, just not in the ways anyone really imagined. Maybe Bush is stupid in a way that is far worse, and far more dangerous for the health of this planet, than mere inarticulate, nonintellectual, semiliterate Texas cow-pie bumbling. It is, in short, the stupidity of the indignant and the self-righteous, of the morally arrogant, of someone whose power base is threatened and yet who is still blindly forcing America down this nightmare path, even when all signs and all leaders and all U.N. councils and all weapons investigators and all flagrant U.S.-sanctioned rapes and tortures are veritably screaming in his face that it is a mistake of increasingly epic, treacherous proportions. And so maybe, ultimately, it all comes back to us. Maybe it is the majority of people in this flag-wavin', happily deluded, fear-drenched country who can't believe it could happen, who simply, you know "misunderestimated" just how poisonous Bush's savage brand of stupidity really is.