You'd rather Dubya watch Rather?

"It's incredible to think that the President of the United States gets his information in Reader's Digest format from people who work for him," according to a recent post from Linkmeister, who links to a transcript of Brit Hume's interview with Dubya on Monday night for Fox News and to a resulting editorial in Thursday's New York Times:

Mr. Bush and his aides also seem to go to great lengths to underline the degree to which the president closes himself off from the news media. In an interview with Fox News this week, the president said he learned most of what he needs to know from morning briefings by his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and his chief of staff, Andrew Card.

As for newspapers, Mr. Bush said, "I glance at the headlines" but "rarely read the stories." The people who brief him on current events encounter many of the newsmakers personally, he said, and in any case "probably read the news themselves."

Some of this may be a pose that is designed to tweak the media by making the news appear to be below the president's notice. During the Iraqi invasion, when the rest of the nation was glued to TV, Mr. Bush's spokesman claimed that his boss had barely glanced at the pictures of what was going on.

But it is worrisome when one of the most incurious men ever to occupy the White House takes pains to insist that he gets his information on what the world is saying only in predigested bits from his appointees.

Professor Eugene Volokh has a post up debunking Slate's Jacob Weisberg's "Bushism of the Day" from the same interview, in which (mis)quotes the President as saying:

"I glance at the headlines just to kind of get a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves."—Washington, D.C., Sept. 21, 2003

Of all the criticisms I've ever seen of Dubya, this is probably the absolute stupidest.

For some considerable period of history, the President of the United States — whether it's been George W. Bush or Bill Clinton or Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln — has had the best information-gathering and -digesting resources available to him that our nation can provide.  Obviously those resources are far from perfect.  As the Times somewhat grudgingly concedes, they include actual news-makers in addition to news-gatherers. 

Card and Rice are just the conduits — not the selectors or pre-digesters of information themselves, for there are surely dozens of those just behind them, and literally tens of thousands of news- and information-gatherers behind those.  The President's "appointees" for that process, as the Times smugly refers to them, would include all of the CIA, the NSA, the DoD, the State Department and, for that matter, every other cabinet department.

The Times may think the national interest would be better served if Dubya kept a clippings notebook, or maybe some index cards that he could add to as he spent six hours a day working through newspapers and magazines.  "Oh, dang-nabbit! ... LAURA!  Could you please come alphabetize these cards for me?  Tony Blair's coming this afternoon, and Barney knocked over the dang box again!"

Or perhaps they'd rather see him hunched over a keyboard working his way through his daily blogroll.  Maybe they'd manage to set him up with an aggregator.  Let's see — should POTUS be reading CalPundit or Atrios to get his daily injection of spin from the left?  Can he also read Drudge?  InstaPundit? ... Mr. President, are you reading BeldarBlog?  [I'm standing and saluting my monitor as I type this!]

Actually, I can imagine Jimmy Carter scanning through a blogroll in the Oval Office.  And that characteristic  was one key explanation for why Jimmy Carter — a brilliant and caring and curious man — became the worst President of my lifetime, possibly the worst of all time.

So how would you rather the President of the United States spend his time?  Reading what the New York Times is speculating about, which is in turn based on what someone has leaked about what the CIA has just learned about the leadership of Iran?  Or reading what the Director of Central Intelligence has just written about what the CIA has just learned about the leadership of Iran? 

And maybe the President should've tuned in to the BBC to get Andrew Gilligan's take on how the Third Infantry Division was doing in its advance toward Baghdad, rather than relying on filtered information from Gen. Tommy Franks via Rumsfield.  Yeah, that's the ticket!

Let's just dump that Rice chick anyway.  PhD, schmee-H-dee.  Who should meet Dubya for his breakfast briefing every day?  Well, isn't it obvious?

Maureen Dowd.