As earlier posters have remarked, it's bad enough when very young people already have ingrained attitudes (and I've met those who are on both the left and the right). As a college instructor, I feel I haven't done my job unless I've gotten people to re-examine some of their prejudices, regardless of their political background. (And when a die-hard Marxist admits that some of the proposals s/he has admired may not be practical, it makes my day -- we aren't the blinkered leftists Bush likes to paint us as.)
"President George W. Bush was introduced to the film "The Grapes of Wrath" as a student at the Harvard Business School, where he got admitted on his family's name. "I wanted to give the class a visual reference for poverty and a sense of historical empathy," macroeconomics professor Yoshi Tsurumi told a researcher for Kitty Kelley's book, "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty."
"George Bush came up to me and said, 'Why are you going to show us that commie movie?'" Tsurumi recalled. "I laughed because I thought he was kidding, but he wasn't. After we viewed the film, I called on him to discuss the Depression and how he thought it affected people.
said, 'Look, people are poor because they are lazy.' A number of students pounced on him and demanded that he support his statement with facts and statistics. He quickly backed down because he could not sustain his broadside."
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0911-21.htm
But what really got me was the attitude towards his own classmates which Bush showed. No wonder some of his colleagues weren't impressed. If someone is unpleasant (as well as lazy and incompetent), word gets around pretty quickly. Someone who really is friendly and kind-hearted can get by in many programs without top-flight academic skills, if they are willing to try -- and likewise, those who are very intelligent and hardworking can be respected (if not loved) by their classmates even if they are viewed as cut-throat and untrustworthy. But Dubya seems to have the worst of both worlds ... and while he's tried to play the affable Texan, not everyone fell for it. I suppose he thought the prof would approve of his killer instinct (shown in the way he dissed his classmates behind their backs). Unfortunately for him, Dr. Tsurumi has ethics!
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091704I.shtml
""He showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him." When asked to explain a particular comment, said Tsurumi, Bush would respond, "Oh, I never said that.""
""Students who challenged and embarrassed Bush in class would then become the subject of a whispering campaign by him, Tsurumi said. "In class, he couldn't challenge them. But after class, he sometimes came up to me in the hallway and started bad-mouthing those students who had challenged him. He would complain that someone was drinking too much. It was innuendo and lies. So that's how I knew, behind his smile and his smirk, that he was a very insecure, cunning and vengeful guy.""
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