That's some fatty.
Notice the cleaning box to Kerry's right (your left) and that bag on the floor looks like it has a pound in it. Rich kids don't buy lids.
I wonder if he still tokes?
Posted on 08/30/2004 11:57:52 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
I wouldn't be so sure about the SAT/college transcript comparison that Raines talks about. Someone just finished comparing W's SAT scores to John F. Kennedy's and determined from those that W had a higher IQ than Kennedy. Old Howell might find himself surprised. As I understand it, Kerry got through Yale with a gentleman's C.
Just as a truly great warrior does not have to tout his bravery.
Great article..Thanks for the link....no gentlemen Cs at HBS...no matter how well connected!
While fun to talk about, this is just another non-issue. Bush is clearly "smart enough to be president" since
he actually IS president. This like saying, "Smarty Jones should have won the Triple Crown." Well, he didn't.
As for bumper-stickers as a political barometer, please. Most people don't have bumper-stickers at all but of those who do, I'll bet 80% of them are young Liberals. Conservatives don't want their car keyed or to be followed home by some lefty whacko.
To be a Republican/conservative President absolutely. Because you have to out-think, out-smart, out-manuever the liberal media ever minute of every day.
To be a liberal, excuse me, "progressive" Democrat president, Hell, no. Cause the media will cover your butt from your first campaign until decades after your death.
No FACTUAL article would ever include a sentence like this: "Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush? I'm sure the candidates' SATs and college transcripts would put Kerry far ahead." Yes, I doubt that. And I use facts, not an imperial observation delivered with a wave of the superior hand (namely Raines').
I was at Yale when Kerry arrived. Bush entered the year that I left. So I know the applicable admissions standards. Furthermore, without going into chapter and verse as to why, I am reasonably certain that both those gentlemen received "early admissions," meaning guaranteed acceptance without waiting for the normal process. I know about that, because I had that too. No one in that era would have gotten early admissions without being at the genius level in I.Q.
I know a little bit about Kerry's academic work. He was bright, but not that bright. He tries to blow smoke about his address delivered at his Commencement. He got that gig because he was President of the Yale Political Union, not because of top scholarship.
Then we look at graduate schools. Bush went to a brand-name graduate school, the Harvard Business School. Kerry went to an off-brand law school, NOT an Ivy League one. Since I went, post-Yale, to an off-brand law school and later an off-brand Ph.D. program, I can GUARANTEE what the difference between those graduate school admissions mean. Bush had a higher achievement level in college than did Kerry (or than did I, for that matter).
So, Raines' pronouncement about relative intellectual abilities and achievements of Kerry and Bush are fact-free, dishonest, and born of his own political bias. I spit on the journalistic "abilities" of Howell Raines, not because he used to work for the NY Times, but because he keeps earning that treatment in drivel such as this article.
Congressman Billybob
Latest column, "The Radio Talk Show Amendment, Or: Why John Kerry is Now Toast"
If you haven't already joined the anti-CFR effort, please click here.
***Having attended Harvard Business School at the same time as the President, graduating from the two-year program a year after he did, and then serving on its faculty after a year’s interval spent writing a PhD thesis, I am intimately familiar with the rigors of the program at the time, and the miniscule degree of slack cut for even the most well-connected students, when their performance did not make the grade. ***
It's my understanding that Ted Kennedy was expelled from Harvard for having someone take an exam for him. He returned later to graduate.
Bush flew a single engine, single seat, high performance jet interceptors. It is challenging, demanding, unforgiving and requires multi-tasking to a degree that only other pilots can understand. Not to mention Bush has a Masters Degree. Bush is not the greatest speaker, he is not the worst either. Let them underestimate him. They will get burned every time!
And boy does it show.
Oh..now it's the dumb Bush again, last week it was smart, coniving Bush, you know these media types have to make up their minds...
Thanks for the insider info.
Bump!
John / Billybob
A second broad and important lesson the President learned at Harvard Business School is to embrace a finite number of strategic goals, and to make each one of those goals serve as many desirable ends as possible. The truism of this lesson is that if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. If you can’t focus on everything, then you need to be able to focus on those few goals which will have the broadest impact, leading to a future capacity to attain other desirable ends. No exact number of goals is the limit, but three is an awfully good number to aim at. Those goals should be mutually consistent, so that the step-by-step accomplishment of each one aids in the achievement of the others.
There is both evidence and logic to suggest that George W. Bush has chosen just a small handful of major goals. His current number one priority was thrust upon him: winning a complete victory in the War on Terror. There is no evidence that this was on his initial short list of priorities. But after 9/11, he made himself very clear, very quickly, that his priorities had drastically changed. He also set out a realistic time frame – decades – for this number one goal. From this broad goal cascade a series of subordinate tasks, from persuading dictators that it is in their interests to eschew support for terror groups, to strengthening American military, intelligence and domestic law enforcement capabilities, for example..................***
Bingo Rip, you nailed it. It's amazing the number of people who don't know the difference between knowledge and wisdom. (hint: only one can be given to others)
Wisdom.
Bump!
The difference between Bush and Kerry (or Gore or Clinton) has been attributed to the fact that Bush had a managerial education and the education of the others was professional (i.e. legal, journalistic, or ministerial). So Bush is confronted with practical problems and seeks practical solutions for them, while the others are looking to craft an intellectual interpretation or understanding of them, based on abstract ideas.
Bush's approach doesn't always work better (Robert McNamara's managerial approach made quite a mess of Vietnam), but does seem to be more appropriate to the "real" practical world most of the time. Academic life involves creating all manner of complicated papers that as often as not avoid coming to a realistic and practical solution of problems. And professional education -- and politics -- have been influenced by such a theoretical and interpretive way of looking at the world, that can be very distant from practical concerns.
The irony, though, is that ideas have come to be very important to the "practical" Bush -- sometimes even outweighing immediate practical concerns -- while the "nuances" of the "intellectual" Kerry look to be more and more without real content, just a way of saying "I'd do things differently" without any clear idea of what should be done. The practical mind eventually does seize on ideas (for good or ill), while the theoretical mind finds it increasingly hard to take firm hold of anything.
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