Just for fun, the opinion of a friend of mine who went to prep school with Bush: "Not the brightest star in the sky." And "He ALWAYS cheats to win."

There's nothing wrong with stressing (in)competence over trustworthiness; it'll definitely work better with people like the friend you paraphrase.

But there will be fewer and fewer people who find Bush trustworthy after a while. Even the very dim-witted in our midst may start to notice the enormous chasm between Bush's statements and the truth.

Mary:

I think it would be great to have companion sites focusing, respectively, on honesty and accountability. Is accountability.com taken? As you point out, accountability is one way of capturing the weasels who refuse to accept Bush's serial dishonesty. One example: For all the folks who will not accept that Bush, or at the very least, Cheney, lied about the forged Nigerian documents, you can fall back on good old incompetence (with an argument I'm surprised not to have seen): Bush builds his State of the Union Address case for WMDs directly upon those forged documents. Let accept for the moment the administration's claim that it didn't know they were forged and the evidence it was presenting was faked. But who did know? The CIA, the ambassador who went to Nigeria, and [others who escape me now]. If Bush were a competent leader, insistent upon good intelligence, he would have a framework in place so that correct information would reach him if it were clear he had been given incorrect information. If we accept the administration's claims of ignorance in this instance, then it must be the case that the President's apparatus for handling and communicating correct intelligence is very weak. It is incomprehensible that no one who knew of these forgeries either saw the SOTU address or read about it.

The bottom line on Iraq really is a matter of deciding what has resulted from dishonesty and what from incompetence.

Niger, not Nigeria. I don't know the adjectival form. Said ambassador has exposed himself here.

demvina,

I think that another case that can be made is in the area of on what basis does Bush make decisions? It is pretty clear that he doesn't look at the quality of evidence that he is getting to make decisions and that at some of his advisors withhold vital information. I wrote up a post that discussed that a week ago in regards to his review of the death sentences he presided over in Texas. The fact that his advisors feel free to feed him garbage is really a concern.

pogo, I'm not surprised. He is definitely a cheater and unreflective as well as a bully. Such nice qualities for a dictator, less so for a president of a Democracy.