Nothing more.
Nothing more.
Intelligence is NOT a virtue. I prefer a virtuous President over a devious con-man any day.
The elites constantly mistake conviction for stupidity and vaccillation for insight.
The number of Bush-bashing books isn't an indication of what Bush is about, it's just proof that LIBERALS think they're funny and smart. But I find they're neither. Conservative I know don't put signs in their yard or sport bumper stickers on their cars because LIBERALS react violently when they see pro Bush sentiments.
And we know all about the rules of "fairness" employed by big news organizations.
It’s hard to travel across the country these days without seeing an old familiar bumper sticker: “Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot.” Perhaps the slogan rang true for many progressive voters in this highly partisan, highly charged and highly polarized electorate. But, if the bumper-sticker crowd believes it refers to George W. Bush, they are sorely mistaken.
Sen. John Kerry can win this election by understanding that he is running against a shrewd, clever and an extremely intelligent opponent who was trained in political combat by the late GOP strategist Lee Atwater.
After I read Ms. Brazille's Newsweek article this morning, I was worried that the Dems finally realized that Bush wasn't stupid. Mr. Raines has put my mind at ease.
This was my question in 2000 when the Democrats nominated Al Gore. The answer then was "no"; has it changed?
Really?
Why doesn't McCain want to ban crap like this?
Howell Raines couldn't figure out Jayson Blair was faking his stories.
Who's dumber here?
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.
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"
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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...
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.