Bush, a Flashman for our times

I recently wrote a post about the curious fact that Bush's vacation reading always makes headlines. While it would be interesting to know what a sitting president is reading, the whole thing just stinks of a White House effort to cast Fearless Leader as serious-minded and intelligent, in spite of being known as the least "intellectually curious" president in modern history, if not ever.

Ezra Klein observes that the White House Press Office is now going a step further, releasing a list of sixty books the president is supposed to have read this year. Somebody out there did a rough take on the numbers, and finds that Fearless Leader would be reading a minimum of several hours every day to have gotten through the list. Hard to believe coming from a man who once boasted of having the day's top news stories condensed and summarized for him instead of bothering with newspapers.

This site has a selection of Bush's alleged reading list, and it's actually pretty funny. There are several of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels present, and I actually enjoyed that series. But there are also a couple of George Fraser's Flashman novels (if you're not familiar with the character, I highly recommend reading about them here) -- stories of a craven, bullying asskisser who bungles his way through the Victorian era and somehow always comes out a winner. Somehow they strike me as a much more suitable choice for the Boy King than MacDonald's two-fisted knight errant.

PS- Why in the world doesn't the president's reading list include anything about, say, the Middle East? I hear some big things are happening over there.