Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many media publications and major political figures continue to claim World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz is an intelligent person capable of generating thoughts which have applications to the real world.
"Let me remind you that we are talking about a man who has a PhD from the University of Chicago," Wolfowitz's friend and fellow noted thinker Richard Perle offered in his defense, "If it seems he sometimes does incredibly stupid things, it is only because he is so brilliant."
Despite holding an advanced degree from a prestigious institution, Wolfowitz's job as President of the World Bank is in jeopardy for giving his girlfriend an enormous tax-free raise while he simultaneously railed about "corruption" in third world countries, something third and fourth graders can identify as unethical without taking graduate courses taught by Leo Strauss.
Media publications like The New Yorker point to Wolfowitz's impressive ability to speak six languages as an indication of brain activity. Despite this linguistic accomplishment, Wolfowitz lacks the ability to wear socks that do not have holes in them while visiting foreign dignitaries. And his fluency in Arabic did not help him predict the insurgency that would plague America's occupation of Iraq from day one.
"Wolf[owitz] is great with the Arabic language, less so with predicting that Iraqi oil sales would finance its own post-war reconstruction," fellow pro-Iraq War writer Christopher Hitchen said while sipping a vodka tonic on a Wednesday morning, "But you gotta trust me on this one, he's a genius."
Wolfowitz received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University which has a long history of producing notable alumni, including Toni Morrison, C. Everett Coop, Pearl Buck, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon. However, none of these notable alumni have the distinction of being called "dangerously idealistic" and "crack-smoking stupid" by Army officer Paul Arcangeli like Wolfowitz.
It is not yet known if Wolfowitz was under the influence of drugs when he drew up plans for the invasion of Iraq.
Wolfowitz's undergraduate degree was math, a notoriously difficult subject. Despite this proven facility with numbers, he later would predict, "It is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army - hard to imagine" in early 2003.
As a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins, Wolfowitz taught at the School of International Studies. Students there could take lessons in diplomacy from a man whose unilateral policies would alienate America from the entire world.
Despite this seeming ignoble legacy, Wolfowitz's intellect has a steadfast supporter in President George Bush, himself an Ivy League graduate who is well known throughout the world for his powerful mind.
"Paul [Wolfowitz] is a good man, a honorable man, a brilliant man," Bush said in his trademark stuccato delivery, "His ideas and accomplishments will be studied by historians for many, many generations. I'd put him up there right up with Don[ald Rumsfeld] and Al[berto Gonzalez] in terms of accomplishments. He does a heck of a job wherever he goes."
Is that a real quote at the end? I've seen some of the other one's about Wolfowitz, so I know they are real, but that last one caps it all.
I would love to see this posted in the WaPo or NY times as an editorial. Man, pretty debilitating piece on the guy. It's true PW is a dangerous mind. Genius as a word has been totally devalued
Posted by: Brian Savage | April 30, 2007 at 06:04 AM
Hey Bri, good to hear from you!
For the record, I made up the quotes from Richard Perle, Christopher Hitchens, and Bush at the end. Reading this over now, I should have made this clearer at the beginning. It was my attempt at Onion-style satire but there was so much material that read like satire but was shockingly *true*, the line was blurred.
Besides those three quotes, everything else in the article is, sadly, true. And those quotes were all quotes I could envision Perle, Hitchens, and Bush saying.
>Genius as a word has been totally devalued<
To say nothing of the idea of accountability. The saddest part of the Bush era was the idea that recklessly launching enormous projects was, in-and-of itself, "genius."
To me, genius toils in the trenches, quietly getting things done. Genius is subtle, nuanced and it is a trait that is only apparent after it has born fruit.
Bush is basically the opposite of that - loud, stupid, and blindly stumbling from one catastrophe to the next.
Posted by: Dave G | April 30, 2007 at 07:55 AM
I'm using this the next time I do something stupid: "If it seems SHE sometimes does incredibly stupid things, it is only because SHE is so brilliant."
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