I&#x27;m personally willing to go with that assertion. Nobody gets to be President by being stupid, as near as I can tell.<p>But if I buy that Bush is so smart, then I have to feel even worse, much worse, about his dragnet surveillance programs, the Iraq War, and a bunch of other stuff, virtually his entire legacy. If he&#x27;s that smart, why did he lie to us about &quot;WMD&quot;, and the (non-)connection between Saddam Hussein&#x27;s Iraq and Al Qeada? What was the real motive for the huge manipulations to get the USA to commit to that war? Why did he think that &quot;SOLARWIND&quot; was such a great idea? Dragnet surveillance is very much against the American tradition, and has definite bad effects, and a slippery slope argument against it. Why did he OK that? Why did he OK &quot;enhanced interrogation&quot; I mean torture?<p>There&#x27;s just so many follow-on questions to that assertion. Did Keith Hennessey really mean to open that kind of a can of worms about Bush?