Harvard Business School Critical of Bush Economics

gregorantic writes "From BusinessWeek Online: 'George Bush, America's first President with an MBA, has been slapped on the knuckles by 169 concerned business-school professors.'"

Comments

Poll of economists

[ratsnapple tea]

Also see The Economist's poll of academic economists, which puts Bush against Kerry and finds Kerry's policies by and large coming out on top. The article notes that while academia may rightly be considered leftist (heh), the poll isn't obviously biased against Bush in its assessment of the economy's recovery and of the president's role in it.

Highly recommended.

Re:Bias?

[demachina]

Uh, where in this did you prove anything Tsurumi said was untrue?

"My daddy got me into the guard despite the waiting list"

George's dad did get him in the guard ahead of a waiting list with 500 or so candidates, there was only a handful of openings. Even worse George outright flunked the aptitude test, and should have been disqualified immediately. Instead he was pushed to the head of the list over people who actually passed the aptitude test.

The only question here is if George had the bad judgement to brag about it. Privileged kids, and I went to college with a bunch of them, often do brag about their privilege.

"Tsurumi: Well attendance was not that bad. But his attention span was very short."

Uh, I imagine most professor can assess the attention span of their students. This doesn't qualify as a smear campaign/agenda.

"How many times did George Bush come drunk to your class, as a student?"

Its no secret George was a massive partier during this period to put it politely. To be impolite about it he was probably an alcoholic, cocaine abuser and a skirt chaser. Its a near certainty he did go to class hungover, most college students do, and its certainly plausible he may have gone to class under the influence. Again you haven't got made a case that Tsurumi was being untruthful. What he is saying is plausible and you can't prove its not, unless maybe you can find someone with sterling credentials in all the same classes who disputes him.

Either Tsurumi doesn't like Bush and has an agenda or Bush had deep character flaws especially around this time. He and his whole family admit he was a very troubled young man, at least until he quit being a drunk, quit doing Cocaine, found Jesus and decided he was going to be President though he clearly isn't qualified for the job.

My favorite Bush quote of the week, when is in White tie and tux giving a speech to the "the haves and the have-mores." Bush smirks: "Some people call you the elite. I call you my base."

Its bad enough that most politicians serve the elite and not the people, but George had the poor judgement to admit it in front of a camera, smirk and make a joke out of it. This is not a person who should be President of the United States.