A former Harvard Business School professor who taught George W. Bush found him to be a
a sarcastic, mediocre student.
Some highlights:
Thirty years after teaching the class, Tsurumi said the twenty-something Bush's statements and behavior--"always very shallow"--still stand out in his mind.
"Whenever [Bush] just bumped into me, he had some flippant statement to make," said Tsurumi when reached at his home in Scarsdale, N.Y. "The comments he made were revealing of his prejudice."
...
Tsurumi said he particularly recalls Bush's right-wing extremism at the time, which he said was reflected in off-hand comments equating the New Deal of the 1930s with socialism and the corporation-regulating Securities and Exchange Commission with "an enemy of capitalism."
"I vividly remember that he made a comment saying that people are poor because they're lazy," Tsurumi said.
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Tsurumi also said Bush displayed a sense of arrogance about his prominent family, including his father, former U.S. President George H.W. Bush.
"[George W. Bush] didn't stand out as the most promising student, but...he made it sure we understood how well he was connected," Tsurumi said. "He wasn't bashful about how he was being pushed upward by Dad's connections."
Tsurumi said that the younger Bush boasted that his father's political string-pulling had gotten him to the top of the waiting list for the Texas National Guard instead of serving in Vietnam. When other students were frantically scrambling for summer jobs, Tsurumi said, Bush explained that he was planning instead for a visit to his father in Beijing, where the senior Bush was serving at the time as the special U.S. envoy to China.
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"I always remember two groups of students," Tsurumi said then, according to published reports. "One is the really good students, not only intelligent, but with leadership qualities, courage. The other is the total opposite, unfortunately to which George belonged."
Let's make it plain: the Bush-Cheney wing of the Republican Party has no respect for capitalism. They love cronyism. They deplore meritocracy, which markets require in order to function. They deplore transparency, which markets require in order to function. And they especially deplore hard work; why do something when someone has already done it for you? Their backwards economic moves--steel tariffs, no-bid contracts for cronies, giveaways to pharmaceutical and insurance companies, turning a blind eye to polluters, gussying up the time-worn bullshit of "comp time," an agriculture policy that makes their caricature of liberalism look parsimonious. All these seem to be coming from all over the map ideologically, but in reality they're part of one consistent theme, the plutocrat's Golden Rule: he who has the gold, makes the rules.
Little surprise then that while his fellow students, future business leaders, were busy learning their craft, Bush was engaged in an ideological dry-humping session. Some things never change.