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Amazing theory Bush 'not really stupid' claims Aussie journalist WHAT does the average armchair critic think of George W. Bush's intellect? The answer is probably summed up in the old joke: "If brains were gunpowder, he wouldn't have enough to blow his hat off." The renowned Australian commentator Peter Hartcher would not agree. He believes Bush is simply playing dumb for electoral reasons. In an article for the Australian Financial Review, Hartcher says: "The Dubya version of the presidency is hardly recognizable as the one that Thomas Jefferson described as being a perpetual state of 'splendid misery'. So it's easy to understand how the President's supposed idiocy and plutocratic twittery has become the butt of late-night TV cracks, anti-Bush websites, and countless millions of derisory critiques and conversations around the world. "But it's a serious mistake to be distracted by these personal foibles. For one thing, Bush is not, despite all evidence to the contrary, an idiot." A recent internet spoof assessed Bush's IQ as 91, the lowest of any president in the past 60 years. Britain's Guardian newspaper fell for the gag. So did Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury strip. Hartcher, though, quotes real Bush statistics: "His score in the standardized American matriculation exam, the SAT, was 1,206 points out of a possible 1,600 – several cuts above average and enough to put him in the 86th percentile for maths and the 88th, believe it or not, for verbal skills. "And Bush's total was not a world away from the mark earned by his Democratic rival in the 2000 election, Al Gore, who scored 12 per cent higher on his SAT. This is a much narrower gap than political lore and public perception would allow; Gore is famed as a font of knowledge and great policy work." Bush has a history degree from Yale and an MBA from Harvard. He does not have a degree in bullshit but could easily qualify for one. Hartcher quotes the argument that when intellectuals sneer at Bush, he confounds them with simple words - Bushisms included. This is psephological wisdom, says Hartcher. In other words, Bush's stumbling, folksy vocabulary is a way of sucking up to under-privileged voters who might otherwise resent his intellectual and financial advantages. Hartcher's article is online at: http://afr.com/articles/2003/09/25/1064083117132.html Those who continue to believe that Bush really is dumb can find strong evidence in a new internet report revealing that his doctors have equipped him with a cerebral pacemaker. The device, an implantable cranial defibrillator, or ICD, continuously monitors and records the president's brain waves. When brain activity becomes dangerously slow, the device delivers a mild electric shock, jolting the president back to normal. "I feel good," the president told reporters several hours after the operation. Bush then twitched noticeably. "I mean, I feel well," he said. The report can be found at http://www.lovenstein.org, the site that revealed Bush's 91 IQ. |
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