Monday, January 03, 2005

Two Different Ways of Saying the Same Thing

And it's about the same person--Dubya. Jerome Doolittle at Bad Attitudes cites John Stuart Mill:

In his Speech on Perfectibility, John Stuart Mill writes, “If there is a man in public or private life who is so impenetrably dull that reason and argument never make the slightest impression upon him, the dull people immediately set him down as a man of excellent judgement and common sense; as if because men of talent and genius are sometimes deficient in judgement it followed that it was only necessary to be without one spark of talent or genius in order to be a man of consummate judgement...Wisdom is supposed to consist not in seeing further than other people, but in not seeing so far.”

Sister Helen Prejean--Timshel provides the link--might be a bit less flowery, but is on the money nonetheless:

The aphorism "A hammer, when presented with a nail, knows to do only one thing" applies, par excellence, to George W. Bush. As governor of Texas, Bush tackled the social problem of street crime by presiding over the busiest execution chamber in the country. At the time of the thirteen death row exonerations in Illinois, Bush stated publicly that although states such as Illinois might have problems with a faulty death penalty system, he was certain that in Texas no innocent person had ever been sent to death row, much less executed. That remains to be seen. What is clear is that he had, as governor, no quality of mercy.

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