BreakTheChain.org
|
|
That's One Dumb ShrubDate Added: July 26, 2001
One of the biggest issues during the hotly contested 2000 presidential election was the apparent lack of intelligence exhibited by Texas republican George W. Bush. Now, here's a "scientific" study that confirms what many suspected all along. The Pennsylvania Court Observer 7-10-01 12:32 PM CST University Notes
Report: President Bush Has Lowest IQ of all Presidents of past 50 Years If late night TV comedy is an indicator, then there has never been as widespread a perception that a president is not intellectually qualified for the position he holds as there is with President GW Bush. In a report published Monday, the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton, Pennsylvania detailed its findings of a four month study of the intelligence quotient of President George W. Bush. Since 1973, the Lovenstein Institute has published its research to the education community on each new president, which includes the famous "IQ" report among others. According to statements in the report, there have been twelve presidents over the past 50 years, from F. D. Roosevelt to G. W. Bush who were all rated based on scholarly achievements, writings that they alone produced without aid of staff, their ability to speak with clarity, and several other psychological factors which were then scored in the Swanson/Crain system of intelligence ranking. The study determined the following IQs of each president as accurate to within five percentage points:
The six Republican presidents of the past 50 years had an average IQ of 115.5, with President Nixon having the highest IQ, at 155. President G. W. Bush was rated the lowest of all the Republicans with an IQ of 91. The six Democrat presidents had IQs with an average of 156, with President Clinton having the highest IQ, at 182. President Lyndon B. Johnson was rated the lowest of all the Democrats with an IQ of 126. No president other than Carter (D) has released his actual IQ, 176. Among comments made concerning the specific testing of President GW Bush, his low ratings were due to his apparent difficulty to command the English language in public statements, his limited use of vocabulary (6,500 words for Bush versus an average of 11,000 words for other presidents), his lack of scholarly achievements other than a basic MBA, and an absence of any body of work which could be studied on an intellectual basis. The complete report documents the methods and procedures used to arrive at these ratings, including depth of sentence structure and voice stress confidence analysis. "All the Presidents prior to George W. Bush had a least one book under their belt, and most had written several white papers during their education or early careers. Not so with President Bush," Dr. Lovenstein said. "He has no published works or writings, so in many ways that made it more difficult to arrive at an assessment. We had to rely more heavily on transcripts of his unscripted public speaking." The Lovenstein Institute of Scranton Pennsylvania think tank includes high caliber historians, psychiatrists, sociologists, scientists in human behavior, and psychologists. Among their ranks are Dr. Werner R. Lovenstein, world-renowned sociologist, and Professor Patricia F. Dilliams, a world-respected psychiatrist. This study was commissioned on February 13, 2001 and released on July 9, 2001 to subscribing member universities and organizations within the education community. Perhaps the main reason most people don't get this joke is that we want it to be true. American radio personality Howard Stern even mentioned this "study" on his nationally syndicated radio show on July 25, 2001. The so-called "King of All Media" also wanted this to be true so much that he missed the joke. But in Mr. Stern's - and everybody else's - defense, the chain is being transformed as it circulates to distance it as much as possible from the humor its authors intended. I was lucky enough to get a copy of this chain early on, when it still had a few cues in it that revealed it as a joke. Particularly, the website listed features the exact same article, reproduced with a Pennsylvania Court Observer banner. So, you can see right away that the e-mail version dropped the author credits: About the authors: Cristina L. Borenstein and Lana Taamar are both recently off the campaign trail where they served as receptionists for the Pennsylvania chapter of Gore For President, Inc., and have co-written the eBook Gore Got Gored. Together they publish the The Pennsylvania Court Observer which has a circulation of 5. Dr. Lovenstein lives in a mobile home in Scranton, Pennsylvania with his long time companion Patricia F. Dilliams. When the two are not publishing reports for their Lovenstein Institute, they run an internet business:
The collegedegreesforsale link, and all other links on the website are actually linked to LinkyDinky.com, a collection of humor links. Subsequent versions of the "report" get shorter and shorter. Here is a version I got the other day that removes practically all references to anything that would expose this as the joke it is: According to a report by the Lovenstein Institute, George Bush has the lowest IQ of all presidents in the last 50 years. Here are the results from the study: The study determined the following IQs of each president as accurate to within five percentage points:
Notice that all the Republicans (save for that genius, Richard Nixon) are ranked at the bottom. Never mind that Roosevelt died in office in 1945, so he hardly belongs in a list of "all presidents in the last 50 years." Also, there is no such thing as a "Swanson/Crain" intelligence test, and an accurate IQ score is hard to get even with structured test, let alone a study of books and speeches. References: None |