Every four years, Americans indulge in the time-honored tradition of voting for the next president. And as they stand in the voting booth, they take into account several very important considerations: which of the candidates has the character, intellect, and moral vigor to lead the nation; which of the candidates do they trust in a time of war; and, perhaps most importantly, how much does each candidate read.
A person's reading habits tell you a lot about their ability to govern -- and a deficiency in one area almost certainly correlates to a deficiency in the other.
If anybody should understand the importance of books and reading, it should be elite Ivory Tower left-wing extremists -- so it's wonderfully ironic that their hero, President Barack Obama, apparently reads less than the much-maligned former President George W. Bush.
In an interview with the BBC Tuesday, Obama said he is currently reading Joseph O'Neill's 270-page novel "Netherland," a book Obama first said he began back in April.
If Obama is close to finishing the novel, that puts him on less than a 10 book-a-year pace, far less than the close to 100 books President Bush was reportedly able to finish in the same amount of time.
Now, where is the outrage? Imagine the hue and cry if President Bush had admitted to reading only 10 books per year. Nancy Pelosi and her fat-cat allies in Congress (looking at you, Barney Frank and Ted Kennedy) probably would have demanded a Truth Commission to investigate why and how Bush read so little. But now that their precious Obama has copped to reading a single book in two months -- a book about Dutch people and cricket, for heaven's sake -- they are oddly silent.
It's all too typical that the very leaders of our nation's bankrupt academic-educational complex would hesitate to criticize The One for not reading enough. Unless it's A People's History of the United States or something by Saul Alinsky, they don't care much for books anyway.
Adult literacy advocate Sara K. Smith writes for NBC and Wonkette.