Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

by Andy Borowitz

He redeployed the Rose Garden strategy, claiming that Bush would be too busy governatin’ to make himself available for public viewings. Theoretically, the two hard half days that Bush put in at the office each week would have left ample time for voters to kick his tires, but Rove would have none of it. On the rare occasions when he did let Bubble Boy out, it became clear that the candidate was a work in progress. When asked on Meet the Press if he had a take on Vladimir Putin, he replied, “I really don’t. I will if I’m the president.” (His eventual take—that he had looked Putin in the eye and got “a sense of his soul”—turned out to be worse than no take.) One week after he announced his candidacy, he confused Slovakia with Slovenia. “Nobody needs to tell me what I believe,” he told Talk magazine. “But I do need someone to tell me where Kosovo is.” He also, it seemed, needed someone to tell him what to call the people who lived there: he called Kosovars “Kosovarians,” much as he called East Timorese “East Timorians,” and Greeks “Grecians.” Attempting a quick injection of gravitas, Rove slated Bush to give a major foreign policy address at the Reagan Library. Thus a man who’d confused Slovakia and Slovenia sought to boost his geopolitical cred by speaking at the shrine to a man who’d confused Brazil and Bolivia.