I think maybe he pounced on the 43rd’s joke earlier today — “there was a time in my life when I wasn’t likely to be found in a library, much less found one” — maybe a little too literally. I present the original analytical stylings of Chris Matthews, everybody: Make sense of it if you can.

I think he fell into bad company. And what I think George Bush’s problem was, having gone to school and put down people like Bob Shrum who read books and thinking they’re all a bunch of intellectuals, and basically mocking that kind of a life where you really are a life of ideas. And then he got into the White House, and all of a sudden fell in love with people with ideas, these neoconservatives, with all their ideas of Strauss and all that stuff, and… whatever it is, some form of Trotskyism or what it is, whatever the tradition those neocons come from… He fell into believing all that stuff, and he started believing this freedom agenda, and all this stuff came from them. It came from bookish people, the same bookish people he put down in college. We would be better off if he studied in college, and then came to the presidency educated so he wouldn’t be a hermit crab. That’s the problem. He had to assume an identity once he was there.

Yes, because people who “read books” are pretty difficult to come by, and I’m sure that the former governor of Texas’s political beliefs were like liquid Jell-O waiting to be molded until the moment he stepped through the White House doors. What the what?