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^ He's not an idiot. He just, like, REFUSES to learn from his mistakes. I can always understand what he's trying to say, what he's getting at, but he NEVER prepares speeches, he NEVER primes for interviews, or goes over possible questions beforehand and once he starts talking-- starts making a point-- he CAN'T just say "you know what? Forget it, I'll get back to this some other time" ... Nope. He just forges ahead, no matter how many times he slips up or says the wrong thing, he pushes forward...
He's obviously not a stupid man, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if he had a learning disability, or a autism-spectrum disorder marked by a high preservation of cognitive and linguistic functioning. Perhaps the A-S disorder previously known as "Asperger's Syndrome", (now simply a specific low severity code diagnosis on the Autism spectrum).
This would make sense in a lot of ways. Asperger's has, of course, become a "hot" diagnosis for children with strong creative abilities but persisting behavioral problems (or, in the stereotypical case, areas of savant-like proficiency or hyper-focused attention), but that's become more of a folk-definition at this point. Instead, Asperger's seems to be defined mostly by an inability to operate within the normative range of social and interpersonal communication. There's also some emotion and intimacy-related symptoms, but... can't speak to that really.
I have a nephew who was diagnosed with Asperger's in the late '90s. He's about to graduate from college, and he is quite smart, but he writes term papers about Jay Leno and the Simpsons, avoids math, history and philosophy like the plague, and has the handwriting of a second grader. He has a solid vocabulary, but he tends to ever-so-slightly misuse words, as though he is unaware of underlying meaning, connotation and implication.
He also SUCKS at making jokes. When his dad forces him to send me Birthday cards, he tries very hard to write something clever, but almost always succeeds only in being almost shockingly insulting, which his father inevitably has to apologize for. It was cute for a while, then it started to become grating, now I just don't read his messages anymore.
Yet he went to school on a performing arts scholarship. Sounds more than a little like Mr. West, don't you think?
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