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Wednesday, August 16, 2006

And we're supposed to believe this?
Posted by Jill | 7:02 AM
Every summer, some moron asks George W. Bush what he's reading, and he always comes up with some title that no one actually believes he would TOUCH, let alone actually read.

This year we're supposed to believe that he's reading L'Étranger, by Albert Camus.

Aside from the fact that since Bush demonized the French for so long, he wouldn't be caught DEAD reading anything by a French author, NO ONE reads Camus outside of French class and the New York City subway.

Perhaps the White House knew that Scarborough's segment on whether Bush is an idiot was coming.

Maureen Dowd has something to say about this as well:

Strangely enough, we find two famous men reading Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” this summer.

One is Jean Girard, the villainous gay French race car driver hilariously played by Sacha Baron Cohen (a k a Ali G and Borat) — the sinuous rival to Will Ferrell’s stocky Ricky Bobby in “Talladega Nights.”

Girard, a jazz-loving, white-silk-scarf-wearing, America-disdaining Formula Un driver sponsored by Perrier, is so smooth he can sip macchiato from a china cup, smoke Gitanes and read “L’Etranger” behind the wheel and still lead the Nascar pack.

Frenchie contemptuously informs “cowboy” Bobby that America merely gave the world George Bush, Cheerios and the ThighMaster while France invented democracy, existentialism and the ménage à trois.

The other guy kindling to Camus is none other than the aforementioned George Bush, who read “The Stranger” in English on his Crawford vacation and, Tony Snow told me, “liked it.” Name-dropping existentialists is good for picking up girls, as Woody Allen’s schlemiels found, or getting through the clove-cigarette fog of Humanities 101. But it does seem odd that W., who once mocked NBC’s David Gregory as “intercontinental” for posing a question in French to the French president in France, would choose Camus over Grisham.

Camus is not beach reading — or brush reading. How on earth did this book make it into the hands of our proudly anti-intellectual president?

“I don’t know how ‘L’Etranger’ made it onto his list,” Mr. Snow said. “I must confess, I read ‘L’Etranger’ 25 years ago.” The rest of W.’s reading list was presidentially correct: two books on Lincoln and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Polio: An American Story,” by David Oshinsky. (Not a word by Merleau-Ponty.)

Debunking the theory that W. had a sports section or Mad magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” tucked inside the 1946 classic of angst, Mr. Snow noted that he and the president had “a brief conversation on the origins of French existentialism, Camus and Sartre.” Pressed for more details by an astonished columnist having trouble envisioning Waco as the Left Bank, the press secretary laughed. “Confidential conversation,” he said, extending the administration’s lack of transparency to literature.


Remember the ridicule that met John Kerry when he was photographed duck hunting in 2004? May we please have some of the same ridicule of the notion that this most incurious of presidents is having deep conversations with Tony Snow about existentialism?
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