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ST:
http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/show...ht=high+prices
vs.
George Bush:
Okay, sorry. That's the typical meme -- that conservatives are stupid, against book-larnin, fixated on God, gays, and guns, and liberals are, well, the opposite. But if you can admit that Democrats are not, in fact, all geniuses, then we are at least on step one for a meaningful dialogue. The next step would be to admit that quite a few conservatives are, indeed, quite smart. Very few important conservative thinkers are fundamentalists (I myself am a conservative evangelical, not a fund.), and some don't even believe in God (e.g., Derbyshire, Goldberg, Krauthammer). There in fact a wide variety of approaches to science, education, and public policy in the conservative movement. But what we are NOT is anti-intellectual, and I would appreciate dropping that asinine at ude towards us. Please.
ST:
http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/show...ht=high+prices
vs.
George Bush:
Better public speakers? Sure. But smarter? I doubt it. I'd be willing to wager that no one on ST is smarter than any of the current living Presidents.
I know this totally screws with the minds of many. It is a first article of faith for most libs (and alot of non-libs) that George Bush is a moron. To them, it is a truism and could not possibly be false, any more than a circle could have corners. But I'm cool like that -- I like to break with convention. I'm not even convinced that Obama is the most brilliant man of the 20th century, or ever. Smart? Absolutely. A great speaker? None better. Possessed of a flawed, toxic ideology that he picked up in the Ivy League (and in the pews of Trinity), which was never challenged and I don't think he thought through? I think so.
http://www.rasmusen.org/x/archives/000268.html
bush had a higher iq than kerry, also his SAT scores were 1206 before adjustment which is above the 85% which was also higher than Bill Bradleys.
If people want to find the SAT scores for Obama, good luck. They're in hiding seeing how the public can only take info on his awesomeness one nugget at a time.
Who was the stupidest U.S. president?
June 22, 2001
Dear Cecil:
I understand that Thomas Jefferson was our smartest president. Who was our stupidest? Second stupidest? A related pair of questions: Did Yale not have an admissions department in the 1960s? If it did, doesn't it owe the country an apology?
Dear Cecil::
I realize there's probably no way the following can be determined with utter certainty. But in the best judgment of presidential scholars, have any of our chief executives--in addition to Ulysses S. Grant and George W. Bush, I mean--been alcoholics?
— Chris Lamb the elder, Baltimore ; David English, Somerville, Massachusetts
I get the feeling you guys are trying to make a point here. But this is no time to be coy. Let's put the question bluntly: Is George W. Bush the stupidest person ever to serve as U.S. president? If not, who is? And isn't he a drunk besides? It's all the fault of those goddamn Republicans on the Supreme Court. Why, I oughta . . .
There, there. Let's take this one step at a time.
(1) Is George W. Bush stupid? We have pretty good data here. In 1999 the NewYorker obtained a copy of the future president's Yale transcript and revealed that he'd had a C average in college and, more interestingly, scored 1206 on his Scholastic Ap ude Test (SAT)--566 on the verbal and 640 on the math.
To find out how this score stacked up, I called Educational Testing Service, publisher of the SAT, and learned that in 1994, SAT scores had been "re-centered." To offset the steady downward drift of test scores over the years, the scoring scale was adjusted upward so that the mean score for both math and verbal was again 500 (the midpoint on a scale of 200 to 800). Those who took the test before 1994 are now en led to add a prescribed amount to their scores to see how they compare to students today. Having made the necessary adjustment, Little Ed announced, "I got 800 on my verbal! I'm a direct beneficiary of the stupidity of the American public!" Doing the same for Bush gives him 640 on both verbal and math, good enough for 88th percentile on the verbal and 86th in math were he entering college now. Those scores may not be as high as mine, of course, or even Al Gore's (625 verbal, 730 math unadjusted), but they ain't bad.
Then again, I recall having seen a college guide circa 1970 that listed the average SAT for Yale freshmen as about 670 in verbal, 705 in math. So Bush was well below average for his class. He must have written a great essay.
(2) Is Bush the stupidest president? Doubtful, but here the data is lacking. You can get a book called The Intelligence of Dogs but not The Intelligence of Presidents. I refrain from the obvious jokes. The best I could come up with was a 1926 list in which intelligence researcher Catharine M. Cox estimated the IQs of 300 famous people based on their achievements in childhood and early adulthood. Presidents ran the gamut from John Quincy Adams (165) to Thomas Jefferson (150) to Ulysses Grant (125). She didn't single out stupid presidents, but near the top of everyone's list you're sure to find Warren G. Harding, probably the nation's least competent chief executive, who described himself as "a man of limited talents from a small town. . . . I don't seem to grasp that I am president." Among presidents since FDR, political scientist Fred I. Greenstein (Presidential Difference: Leadership Style From FDR to Clinton) cites Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan as being "marked by cognitive limitations," although even detractors would concede they had their gifts.
Smarts aren't easy to judge. Greenstein gives John F. Kennedy high marks for brains, but according to biographer Thomas C. Reeves (author of the infamous A Question of Character), Kennedy as a kid scored a less-than-brilliant 119 on the Otis Intelligence Test and graduated 65th out of 110 at Choate. And remember Bill Bradley, who everybody considered brainy but boring? His verbal SAT score, according to Slate: just 485.
(3) As for alcoholic presidents . . . define alcoholic. According to The Health of the Presidents (1994) by John M. Bumgarner, the following were heavy drinkers: Martin Van Buren, Franklin Pierce (died of cirrhosis), James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson (appeared drunk at the inauguration in 1865), Ulysses S. Grant, and Chester A. Arthur. The next edition may include George W., who had that 1976 drunk driving conviction. Regarding other substance abuse . . . does it count if you don't inhale?
— Cecil Adams
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/...-u-s-president
All it takes to be a good president is common sense and principles....and an appreciation of the founding principles for which this country was built upon which Obama certainly does not have.
Brains brains brains....< Common sense.
Not all of us can afford to take expensive KAPLAN classes to teach us the SAT. Even so, 1206 (is it even possible to have a score not divisible by 10?) doesn't do much to support the idea of Bush being smarter than us.
It's 1250 after the 1994 SAT adjustment, nuance.
Guiding the thread back to the topic...
http://gawker.com/5185380/sarah-pali...ver-washington
When it rains, it pours.
Well, Palin didn't have anyone to pray with before the debate, so she is now blaming her ty performance as a candidate on God.
This is possible true.
When I was 18, I was walking in downtown Portland, and struck up a conversation with a beautiful girl. We walked for a few blocks and ended up in "The Church of Scientology." I never knew what it was before, but went there again with her. Needless to say, that was enough for me. I didn't like their methods, beliefs, or strategies. It wouldn't surprise me what you say is true. I never went to the church again, or saw her again either.
Yes, I rip up democrats all the time. It's too damn easy to do with verifiable facts. I don't need to rip them up with lies and slander.
Well said. I too will criticize her when it is warranted. I'm simply tired of the slander tactics used constantly by the left.
Has there been anything important to criticize her about?
But lies, name calling, deception, and slander is all the left knows how to do. You don't expect them to be realistic do you?
Actually it was the essay that his father wrote that really got him into Yale.
At great personal expense and risk I have obtained a copy of that essay, and can provide, exclusively to Spurstalk, a brief exceprt of the essay that got George HW into Yale.
Here they are, the first few words of the essay that got our last president into Yale:
"Pay the order of..."
It's a sad fact of life that such a thing happens. I'll bet that was how Kerry got in good schools as well.
It would not surprise me.
What would surprise me is if a pampered rich kid would volunteer to go to a war zone, like Gore and Kerry did in Vietnam.
we can all agree that W was disaster
At least president Bush had what it took to become an aviator...It would not surprise me.
What would surprise me is if a pampered rich kid would volunteer to go to a war zone, like Gore and Kerry did in Vietnam.
bush can't spell aviator
No, we can not agree on that. I dislike some of his proposed policies like Amnesty for illegals, but he was overall a good president.
He was certainly motivated to avoid going to war.
And he was a horrible president. Ignoring terrorism until 9/11 then using as an excuse to start an unnecessary war trumps anything positive he may have ever done.
stfu--don't you have some strippers to pay for acting as though they like you?
Like always, you have nothing intelligent to say.
For You Oh Gee... From one of my Bartender/Dancer friends:
Last edited by Wild Cobra; 04-14-2009 at 06:38 PM.
I think that's a pretty bold and nonsensical statement. If you know the group of people that founded this site, you'd know that they had been on the internet for some time. Those types of people tended to be from science/research or computer related jobs. I know that I can unabashedly call Dubyah stupid if those mid 80s percentile scores posted for him are accurate. Lest I be mocked like WC, who boasted his unsolicited, If there were a MENSA inside of MENSA, I'd only be a couple of percentage points from being eligible for that. For all that (and remember, you started this and threw the challenge down), baseline bum leaves me in the dust. He's a true math/physics/computer genius, and I would guestimate that his IQ is probably in the 150s to 160s range. Sorry if I guessed low, bb.
Don't think that there aren't extremely smart people posting here, or that if there are, they are automatically conservative. I hate what the GOP has become: the Christian Taliban. The hypocrisy of the so called Right to Life movement never ceases to amaze me. They fight to save a few unaware cells, but have no problem supporting capital punishment or any war/conflict that comes down the pike. It's OK to sacrifice young men and women to preserve your stock portfolio and way of life, but not to use some embryo that is one of 20 started for a couple, that will never be implanted, to further spinal cord repair research? WTF? That is stupid, and anti-intellectual, and de rigeur for the GOP these days.
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