I don't believe, these days, that Bush is a moron. He's not terribly intelligent, but his intelligence is limited more by his deliberate adherence to an ideology that makes him stupid rather than by a lack of innate ability. His "too stupid to speak coherently" image is at least in large part deliberately assumed.
His ideology makes him stupid because it guides him to see any issue as pure black or pure white based on superficial tests against a short arbitrary list of unquestionable moral principles. The fact that those moral principles are a carefully chosen subset of the large and contradictory jumble of Christian thought is not the problem. It's the ideology that leads to reasoning like "al-Qaida is true evil, therefore it's OK to torture people we think might be members of al-Qaida", or "abortion is evil, therefore it's wrong to fund groups that sometimes favor abortions, even when those groups are the only hope mothers in some poor countries have of getting any kind of medical care".
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Date: 2004-11-11 12:12 pm (UTC)His ideology makes him stupid because it guides him to see any issue as pure black or pure white based on superficial tests against a short arbitrary list of unquestionable moral principles. The fact that those moral principles are a carefully chosen subset of the large and contradictory jumble of Christian thought is not the problem. It's the ideology that leads to reasoning like "al-Qaida is true evil, therefore it's OK to torture people we think might be members of al-Qaida", or "abortion is evil, therefore it's wrong to fund groups that sometimes favor abortions, even when those groups are the only hope mothers in some poor countries have of getting any kind of medical care".