LameList!

Karl Rove’s  opinion piece in the WSJ “Bush Is a Book Lover”  explains alot about the past 8 years. The article tells us about the vast quantities of books that he and Bush have read each year for the past few years.

Rove and Bush had a contest of sorts to see who could read the most books.  For 2006, Rove writes:

At year’s end, I defeated the president, 110 books to 95. 

Fifty-eight of the books he (Bush) read that year were nonfiction. Nearly half of his 2006 reading was history and biography, with another eight volumes on current events (mostly the Mideast) and six on sports.

In 2007, Rove won, 76 books to 51.  Thus far in 2008, it’s Rove 64, Bush 40.

We all have 24 hours in a day. Bush does not have to do laundry, cook, drive to the office, do the grocery shopping, etc. so, granted, he does have some discretionary time that most of us regular folks do not. But, my word! That’s a lot of time spent curled up with a book.

Imagine a world where Bush read “only” half the 110 books.

In 2006, that means he still would have read 55 books. Instead of reading 55, imagine he used that time to read briefings.  Briefings on defense issues. On financial, economic issues. Domestic issues such as our educational system, unemployment, technology, et al. 

Now let’s take those 55 books we let him read in 2006 and sprinkle in a few highly relevant books about financial markets.  

Here is a proposed reading list. Imagine if Bush had read some of these relevant books (mouse over for a photo of the book cover and more info):

• The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
• The Bill from the China Shop: How Asia’s Savings Glut Threatens the World Economy
• The Dollar Crisis: Causes, Consequences, Cures , Revised and Updated
• Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks
• Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons from Wall Street’s Four Great Bottoms
• Tomorrow’s Gold: Asia’s age of discovery

With the remaining time left, let’s suppose Bush pondered. That is, just thought about things. Thought them through. Think about it.