Bush Smarter than Kerry

Off Topic Politics and World Issues
1

Interesting piece here, debunking the myth about the two’s comparable intelligence

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/kerry_iq_lower.htm

Heres a short piece from the article

Oh yeah?

On this tenth anniversary of the publication of the much-denounced The Bell Curve, it’s amusing to reflect on one of the enduring ironies of American political life. Liberals tend to believe two things about IQ:

First, that IQ is a meaningless, utterly discredited concept.

Second, that liberals are better than conservatives because they have much higher IQs.

Thus back in May, hundreds of liberal websites, and even the prestigious Economist magazine, fell for a hoax claiming to show that states that voted for Al Gore in 2000 have higher average IQs by as much as an incredible 28 points than states that voted for George W. Bush.

(In reality, no such data exist. But, for what it’s worth, Bush and Gore voters were identical in educational level, and the states they won were almost dead even in 8th grade achievement test scores.)

Similarly, in 2001, many liberals, including Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau and The Guardian newspaper, fell for the notorious “Lovenstein Institute” prank, which absurdly claimed that the IQ of Bush, a man with two Ivy League degrees, was a sub-average 91, while Bill Clinton’s was a Galileo-like 182.

But now I’ve turned up some hard facts about the IQs of Kerry and Bush.

Most significantly, at the age of 22, both men took the IQ-type tests required of candidate military officers. (The U.S. military, which has studied the predictive power of IQ in vastly more detail than any other institution, remains intensely dedicated to the value of intelligence testing.)

Bush’s scores on the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test have been briefly mentioned in the press. But no-one before now has fully explained what they mean.

And, even more important, this is first article to publish Kerry’s score on the Navy’s Officer Qualification Test.

The two tests aren’t perfectly comparable. But they provide no evidence that Kerry is smarter. If anything, Bush is smarter than Kerry.

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Heh. What’s funny to me is that I took my SAT in high school hung over (I lacked some perspective in my youth…) and would have killed Kerry’s deduced score:

NEWSMAX reports:

EXCERPT: Brokaw: Kerry Blamed Low IQ Score on Drinking

John Kerry told NBC newsman Tom Brokaw last week that the reason President Bush outscored him on military intelligence tests was that he had likely been drinking the night before his exam.

Brokaw revealed Kerry's off camera excuse in an Election morning interview with radio host Don Imus.

"I asked the question of John Kerry because the New York Times had reported that a man by the name of David Sailer had analyzed their military aptitude tests and then had,

had IQ experts do an analysis as well - or the Times did," the NBC anchorman explained. “And they concluded that George W. Bush might be a point or two higher than John Kerry in IQ.” Brokaw continued:

"And John Kerry was caught a little off guard, he said. 'Well, more power to him. I thought that, that was not public.' And when the interview was over he said, 'I must have been drinking the night before I took that military aptitude test.'"