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
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Thanks for the insider info.