George Bush has read how many books?

The Bush Revisionist History Project is in full swing. In interviews on Sunday, Condi Rice told CBS News that Bush "has delivered policies that are going to stand the test of time," and Laura Bush had this exchange with Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday":

WALLACE: And how do you respond to some people — and you know this is going to be true, because you look at the polls — who are going to view this as a failed presidency?

L. BUSH: Well, I know it's not. And so I don't really feel like I need to respond to people that view it that way. And I think history will judge and we'll see later.

In Friday's Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove called Bush a closet intellectual. I shit you not.

In the 35 years I've known George W. Bush, he's always had a book nearby. He plays up being a good ol' boy from Midland, Texas, but he was a history major at Yale and graduated from Harvard Business School. You don't make it through either unless you are a reader.

Or unless your dad is the director of the CIA. Whatever.

Rove, Condi, et al., will spend the next two decades revising the Dubya Years: recasting the administration's foreign policy from a failure on every front -- Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East, Burma, Darfur -- into a reasoned response to 9/11; recasting Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and waterboarding from embarrassing violations of human rights to necessary steps in the War on Terror; and recasting the financial meltdown as, um, as -- I have no idea how they'll spin that one.

Dubious as the 200-book claim sounds, Richard Cohen didn't call bullshit in today's Washington Post column -- instead turning the book list into another example of Bush's decision-now-evidence-later approach to governing.

It is awfully late in the day for Rove -- and, presumably, Bush -- to assert the president's intellectual bona fides. Now feeling the hot breath of history, they are dropping the good ol' boy persona and picking up the ol' bifocals one. But the books themselves reveal -- actually, confirm -- something about Bush that maybe Rove did not intend. They are not the reading of a widely read man, but instead the books of a man who seeks -- and sees -- vindication in every page. Bush has always been the captive of fixed ideas. His books just support that.

The list Rove provides is long, but it is narrow. It lacks whole shelves of books on how and why the Iraq war was a mistake, one that metastasized into a debacle. Absent is Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," Tom Ricks's "Fiasco," George Packer's "The Assassins' Gate" or, on a related topic, Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side" about "extraordinary rendition" and other riffs on the Constitution. Absent too is Barton Gellman's "Angler," about Dick Cheney, the waterboarder in chief.

Jason Linkins did call bullshit Monday in The Huffington Post.

Consider your own reading habits and imagine the sheer amount of free time it would take you to read ninety-five books in a year. This is the feat that Karl Rove insists President Bush pulled off in 2006. Granted, at first one suspects that many of those may have been picture books, or pop-up books, or brochures for pop-up books that came in the mail, addressed to "RESIDENT." Still, we told are Bush read many weighty tomes during 2006. Of course, one of those was Team Of Rivals, and I've decided that I no longer believe anyone when they say they've read Team Of Rivals. Bush is said to have read 51 books in 2007 and 40 this year -- a curious decline, given that this year, Bush seemed to have much more free time at his disposal.

For the record, I call bullshit.