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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (170757)	8/12/2001 11:48:18 PM
From: rich4eagle	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Great Post, and cudos to you American Spirit for (like Howard Cosell used to say) saying it like it is, keep plugging maybe someday we can even make an impact

To: American Spirit who wrote (170757)	8/13/2001 8:01:54 AM
From: George Coyne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

I said it was a funny report not a very accurate one. You said "GW reportedly has an IQ of 91." Your credibility is now zero.

To: American Spirit who wrote (170757)	8/14/2001 10:40:14 AM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

Has anyone pointed out that the Bush IQ of 91 story was a hoax? The envelope please. And the World's Laziest Columnist is . . . Gwynne Dyer! We know what you're thinking: Who the heck is she? Actually, Gwynne's a guy, and according to his bio on this page, he is "one of Canada's media renaissance men, an outstanding journalist, broadcaster, producer, author and filmmaker who now makes his home in London." He claims his syndicated column appears in 150 newspapers, but we found the column that won him this coveted award in only three: Australia's Canberra Times, New Zealand's Southland Times and New Jersey's Newark Star-Ledger. So how is Dyer lazy? Let us count the ways. First, the premise of his column is the most tiresome cliché around: that President Bush is not too bright. When the Star-Ledger ran the column last Tuesday, it gave it the oh-so-subtle headline "Too Dull-Witted to Lead." Second, Dyer offers the following "evidence" of Bush's supposed intellectual shortcomings: IQ tests are notoriously unreliable, and we all know that "IQ" does not correspond very closely to executive ability. But the Lovenstein Institute's conclusions about George W. Bush are nevertheless illuminating. The Lovenstein Institute, based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, has long published an IQ for each new president, based on his academic performance, writings "achieved without aid of staff," linguistic clarity, and so on. It's rough and ready stuff, but it awarded Bill Clinton an astonishing IQ of 182 (the average in the U.S. today is around 104), which largely conforms to one's previous impression that the man was useless but brilliant. . . . At the other end are the Bushes. Even the father only scored 98, but he did seem in charge of his White House. He was, after all, a man with long service in Bureaucratic wars and much foreign experience as well. But George W. Bush has no such background, and the Lovenstein Institute estimates his IQ at 91. . . . It is a harsh and an early verdict, but maybe things are spinning out of control just because they are smarter than he is. There's just one problem, and we'll let the Star-Ledger explain it. On Saturday the Jersey paper ran the following correction (which we couldn't find on its Web site): A column by Gwynne Dyer on Tuesday's op-ed page contained incorrect information. The column cited a study by the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton, Pa., that concluded President Bush had the lowest IQ of any recent president. There is no Lovenstein Institute in Scranton, Pa., and no such study was conducted. U.S. News & World Report (fifth item) pegs the "Lovenstein study" as an "Internet hoax," and the excellent Snopes.com urban-legend site has a thorough debunking. So Dyer is citing a canard to confirm a cliché. But we have not finished plumbing the depths of his intellectual indolence. It turns out even in being duped he was merely being derivative. All of the "information" about the "study" that Dyer included in his "column" had appeared in London's left-wing Guardian nearly three weeks earlier, and Dyer doesn't even "credit" the Guardian for its "reporting"! We actually saw the Guardian piece back in July and thought about excerpting it for our How Others See U.S. feature. But the story seemed far-fetched to us, so we checked it out by running a Yahoo! search, which turned up no evidence of the institute's existence. Accordingly, we dropped the idea of using the Guardian column. Now, we don't mean to pat ourselves on the back for our diligence. Conducting that search took us no more than 10 seconds. Our point is that Gwynne Dyer was too lazy to do even that minimal amount of work. Canada's renaissance man indeed. opinionjournal.com