The reading list wars

Whatever became of the "reading list wars?" Well, Obama pretty much lost that race/battle in 2009, back when the lapdog media were still presenting GW Bush as a dumb, ignorant, gaffe-prone ignoramous. Then when they stared checking things, Obama came out to be the light weight who didn't know history, political science, finance, business or religion, and wouldn't learn from history. He mostly read stuff written by other Democrats or himself. Also, over time, the media learned Obama couldn't even keep track of the words put in front of him by his writers on the teleprompter, and mispronouned or misspoke often. So the comparisons just weren't fun anymore, plus, it was all Bush's fault anyway, so why did it matter?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/books/19read.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.

His predecessor, George W. Bush, in contrast, tended to race through books in competitions with Karl Rove (who recently boasted that he beat the president by reading 110 books to Mr. Bush’s 95 in 2006), or passionately embrace an author’s thesis as an idée fixe. Mr. Bush and many of his aides favored prescriptive books — Natan Sharansky’s “Case for Democracy,” which pressed the case for promoting democracy around the world, say, or Eliot A. Cohen’s “Supreme Command,” which argued that political strategy should drive military strategy. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility.