The question that has never been answered satisfactorily: Is Bush too dumb to be President?

Ron Suskind's new book, "The One Percent Doctrine," paints a harrowing picture of Bush's intellectual limits. Bush, writes Suskind, "is not much of a reader." He prefers verbal briefings and often makes a horse-sense judgment based on how confident his briefer seems in what he's saying. In August 2001, the CIA was in a panic about an upcoming terrorist attack and drafted a report with the title, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." When a CIA staffer summed up the memo's contents in a face-to-face meeting with Bush, the president found the briefer insufficiently confident and dismissed him by saying, "All right, you've covered your ass, now," according to Suskind. That turned out to be a fairly disastrous judgment.

Video of a presidential meeting that came to light this year showed Bush being briefed on the incipient Hurricane Katrina. His subordinates come off as deeply concerned about a potential catastrophe, but Bush appears blase, declining to ask a single question.

Bush's supporters have insisted for the last six years that liberal derision of the president's intelligence amounts to nothing more than cultural snobbery. We don't like his pickup truck and his accent, the accusation goes, so we hide our blue-state prejudices behind a mask of intellectual condescension.

But the more we learn about how Bush operates, the more we can see we were right from the beginning. It matters that the president values his gut reaction and disdains book learnin'. It's not just a question of cultural style. The president's narrow intellectual horizons have real consequences, sometimes cataclysmic ones.

And what is perhaps the most frustrating portion of Bush's "anti-intellectualism" is the fact that the man does not seem capable of learning from his mistakes. Even after devastating setbacks in Iraq, Bush continues to use the phrase "stay the course" as the way out of the abyss.

Dumbass, the "course" is what drove you into the crater in the first place!

Now we are on the precipice of starting the same type of campaign in North Korrea and Iran. Those of us who are "reality based" cannot imagine anybody being so blindedly arrogant. But George Bush has learned nothing! Therefore he could certainly make this same mistake over and over again.

Our only hope is that somebody, somewhere can stop him before he contnues down this path of American destruction.