"They were right that Bush doesn't have a deep grounding in history"
President Bush majored in history at Yale. He knows more history than his detractors put together
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Also, he reads vociferously, and a good deal of his reading seems to be about historical figures, particularly American presidents.
This is not a stupid or uninformed man. He is not a smooth talker, and, in their arrogance, his media detractors equate their own glibness with superior critical thinking skills. There are many kinds of "intelligence" and facility with language is but one of them.
He is a lot more glib than he wishes to appear.
He does have the Bush family 'English as a Second language' syndrome, but his use of 'nukular' for 'nuclear' and 'athalete' for 'athlete' are affectations he uses deliberately to help his detractors misunderestimate him.
So9