The Worst President in History?

I can't wait for ex-president Bush to dedicate the Bush library. It will cover about 100 square feet adjacent to the chicken coop on his ranch.

Intrepid, did you place a mole in the White House library? Did this come from Jeff Gannon, male prostitute and ace Republican reporter?

--
Advocate wrote:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MM, it is just sinking in. The thought that some day people will view Bush as a genius is too funny. He is not only the worst president in history, but the dumbest.

I am certain that he got through the prestigious schools by virtue of his name. The schools realize that there are big bucks in having wealthy sons and daughters attend. They probably got a lot of money from Bush himself. As you may know, he was denied entry into the U. of Texas law school.

I read a piece by one of his professors, who said Bush was, basically, an absolute lout.

**********************************************************
Would you care to give evidence that Yale and Harvard let in students who cannot perform adequately in their schools, Advocate?

You won't because you can't. You don't know a thing about Yale and Harvard.

People who were never in those schools do not know that all those schools have to keep them at the top of the lists is credibility.

You really think that Harvard would bend the rules for a person if they have political influence and money?

You are wrong!

Do you know that a student whose father was one of the most influential and richest on the East Coast was once EXPELLED from Harvard for Cheating on a Spanish Test?

Unlike you, Advocate, who do not give links and evidence of any kind, I do give evidence.

Why don't you grow up and come to the realization that no one with sense believes the garbage you write since you never prove anything with evidence or documentation?


QUOTE
Ted Gets Expelled from Harvard for Cheating
( and Joins the Army )
The following are excerpts from :
The Kennedy Men: Three Generations of Sex, Scandal, and Secrets
- by Nellie Bly



-1-
- Ted managed to graduate from prep school (Milton Academy) in 1950 with only a C average.
- Teddy was never a scholar, and his brother Jack once referred to him as "the gay illiterate".

- Despite his terrible grades, Teddy (like brother Robert) was admitted to Harvard as a "legacy", because his older brothers and father had graduated form there with such distinction.

- Yet even at Harvard, young Ted floundered.
- In his sophomore year he was expelled for cheating. He had been failing Spanish and feared it would keep him off the varsity football team.
- He paid a friend to take the exam for him.
- Ted's friend, however, was recognized when he turned in the exam book.

- Both lads were expelled, but were advised that they could apply for readmission in a year if they demonstrated responsible citizenship.
- It was a shame and disgrace, but the family would manage to keep it a secret until Teddy ran for the Senate.

END OF QUOTE

Advocate wrote:

I read a piece by one of his professors, who said Bush was, basically, an absolute lout.
end of quote
Really? I think you are lying since I have never read any such thing and have read most of the comments about President Bush.

You can change my mind by providing a source, but YOU HAVE NO SOURCE--YOU MADE IT UP!!!

I defy you to find a quote from one of his professors who said he was an absolute lout!

Intrepid- You are confusing your Comic Book Collection with the books that President Bush read this summer. They were:

quote

NEW YORK, Aug. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- On Tuesday, August 16th the White House released President Bush's summer vacation reading list. Two of the three nonfiction titles were New York Times bestselling Penguin trade paperbacks: THE GREAT INFLUENZA: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M. Barry and SALT: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

Stories about Bush's choice of summer reading ran nationally appearing in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Seattle Post- Intelligencer, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Miami...

Intrepid- The Universities in Canada are far far below the standard provided by the Universities attended by President Bush--Yale and Harvard. You aren't denigrating his Universities because Canada is so greatly lacking in good Universities- are you?

I hope that Advocate does not mind if I post now.

First, Bernard, you should really learn how to use the quote function. It would truly help us to read your posts without confusion. I hope.

Anyhow, you may want to read the following.....

How affirmative action helped George W.
By Michael Kinsley
Monday, January 20, 2003 Posted: 12:00 PM EST (1700 GMT)


The president might ask himself, "Wait a minute. How did I get into Yale?"

George W. Bush is all for diversity, he explained last week, but he doesn't care for the way they do it at the University of Michigan. The Administration has asked the Supreme Court to rule the Michigan system unconstitutional because of the scoring method it uses for rating applicants.

"At the undergraduate level," said Bush, "African-American students and some Hispanic students and Native American students receive 20 points out of a maximum of 150, not because of any academic achievement or life experience, but solely because they are African American, Hispanic or Native American."

If our President had the slightest sense of irony, he might have paused to ask himself, "Wait a minute. How did I get into Yale?" It wasn't because of any academic achievement: his high school record was ordinary. It wasn't because of his life experience--prosperous family, fancy prep school--which was all too familiar at Yale. It wasn't his SAT scores: 566 verbal and 640 math.

They may not have had an explicit point system at Yale in 1964, but Bush clearly got in because of affirmative action. Affirmative action for the son and grandson of alumni. Affirmative action for a member of a politically influential family. Affirmative action for a boy from a fancy prep school. These forms of affirmative action still go on.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Harvard accepts 40% of applicants who are children of alumni but only 11% of applicants generally. And this kind of affirmative action makes the student body less diverse, not more so. George W. Bush, in fact, may be the most spectacular affirmative-action success story of all time. Until 1994, when he was 48 years old and got elected Governor of Texas, his life was almost empty of accomplishments.

Yet bloodlines and connections had put him into Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, and even finally provided him with a fortune after years of business disappointments. Intelligence, hard work and the other qualities associated with the concept of merit had almost nothing to do with Bush's life and success up to that point.

And yet seven years later he was President of the U.S. So what is the difference between the kind of affirmative action that got Bush where he is today and the kind he wants the Supreme Court to outlaw? One difference is that the second kind is about race, and race is an especially toxic subject. Of course, George W.'s affirmative action is about race too, at least indirectly.

The class of wealthy, influential children of alumni of top universities is disproportionately white. And it will remain that way for a long time--especially if racial affirmative action is outlawed. A second difference is that the Michigan system is crudely numerical, whereas the favoritism enjoyed by George W. Bush is baked into the way we live.

Intrepid wrote:

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Harvard accepts 40% of applicants who are children of alumni but only 11% of applicants generally. And this kind of affirmative action makes the student body less diverse, not more so. George W. Bush, in fact, may be the most spectacular affirmative-action success story of all time. Until 1994, when he was 48 years old and got elected Governor of Texas, his life was almost empty of accomplishments.

**********************************************************

Henry Rosovsky- Author of "The University-An Owner's Manual" wrote--

P. 64

"Another group consists of legacies and their close relative, faculty children. Both are expected to be treated on an"All other things being equal" basis. At Harvard, legacies are the sons and daughters of the graduates of the Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges...By all things being equal" I mean that the legacies and faculty children will be given preference PROVIDED that their other qualifications are as strong as with those whom they have to compete"



Now, Intrepid, I read your evidence carefully- Now read mine and please don't skip over anything---


Business Week


"Harvard gave me the tools and the vocabulary of the business world," George W. Bush wrote in his 1999 book A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House. He didn't take that line from a Harvard Business School brochure, but he could have. It makes you wonder what really happened at the B-school that Bush writes so, well, methodically about.

A lot has been made of the fact that the new President holds a Master's of Business Administration, rather than the law sheepskin that most national politicians claim. Some pundits have gone so far as to say that the lessons Bush learned in two years of case studies and financial analysis will make him a better leader -- just look at all the stories recently about how Bush is managing the White House as if he were a CEO. Curiously, though, in his 243-page book, Bush dedicates only five paragraphs to the time in his life when he "was fascinated by the case study method that Harvard used to teach."

Dubya fascinated by the Harvard case-study method? Come on, let's have a little more detail. What about burning the midnight oil? What about the toga parties? Did he kiss up to professors to get better grades? He'd go on to own the Texas Rangers baseball team, but could he find the time to play intramural softball?

Dip into the class of 1975 alumni roster, and there's something to be learned about Bush the B-school student. Lesson No. 1 is what a tight group this is, all still looking out for each other. But they tell some interesting tales nonetheless.

RESUME BUILDING. The story starts with Bush's application. These days, getting into Harvard's B-school, No. 3 in the nation according to BusinessWeek's 2000 Rankings, is no easy feat. Acceptance requires a resume with plenty of real-world work experience, a degree and a strong grade-point average from a reputable undergrad school, top Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) scores, and strong evidence of leadership capabilities.

In 1973, "making the bar [at Harvard] was 98% meritocracy," says Michael Porter, now one of the B-school's most well-known professors and an expert in international competitive strategy. Bush's application landed at Harvard while his dad, George H. W. Bush, was chairman of the Republican National Committee. One year later, Poppy would become the top U.S. diplomat to China.

Surely junior's application stood out. George W. Bush was a picture of honor once he got past his party days at Yale with the Delta Kappa Epsilon brothers and members of Skull & Bones, a secret society that enrolled him during his senior year -- so hush-hush, in fact, it barely gets a mention in his book. Bush earned an undergraduate degree in history from Yale in 1968. His grades weren't great, and nobody can seem to locate his GMAT scores. But by 1973, he had completed a five-year stint in the Texas National Guard, worked on his father's failed 1970 Texas campaign for U.S. senator, and worked full-time for ProjectPULL, an organization that worked with inner-city youth.

"TURNING POINT." His experience at ProjectPULL, while "tragic, heartbreaking, and uplifting, all at the same time," Bush writes, was also a perfect stint for a B-school application. He admits in his book that "business school was a turning point.... By the time I arrived, I had had a taste of many different jobs but none of them had ever seemed to fit."

Once he sat down for his first core-curriculum class, Bush was just like any other MBA, people remember. "He was a nice young man," professor Michael Yoshino says, though he never had him as a student in class. "He would go to the library occasionally," says classmate Richard Payne, 52. "He liked to talk politics," too, Payne adds, though it wasn't a popular topic among B-schoolers. "He was keenly interested in what was going on in the world."

Around campus, people would point him out. "At a place like Harvard Business School, you always know who the sons or daughters -- but mostly the sons -- of famous people were," says Ruth Owades, chairman of Calyx & Corolla, a high-end flower catalog company and also a member of the class of 1975. "And then there were the rest of us."

WAS DUBYA A "POET"? Owades says she made the cut at Harvard because she was a "Founding Poet." These MBAs didn't have all of the quantitative and business experience usually required at Harvard, but rather a background in the liberal arts. Shortly after classes started, an administrator called Owades to a meeting and told her that she was among 3% of the class that served as a "test." Only Bush and the admissions department know for sure, but chances are, George W., with his degree in history, was likewise a "poet."

Bush was no Baker Scholar, one of the top honors for a Harvard Business School grad. But he wasn't a bad student either, professors say. Harvard breaks its 800-student MBA classes into sections, and Bush was placed in Section C -- a generic classification with no relation to his grades. It was Porter's first year teaching business policy, and he got Section C. "He was an unpretentious, good middle-of-the-road student," Porter remembers.

But he adds good-naturedly: "I was so green in those days that I wouldn't be able to spot a good manager from a bad one." Porter has since worked on Bush's 2000 Presidential campaign, after having developed a strategic plan for Texas when Bush became governor. What Bush wasn't, Payne says, was a "grade grubber" -- Harvard-ese for a brown-noser.

SLOPPY PAD. George W. was humble even then. One professor says Bush "didn't emphasize his background [at] Yale or his father." But books aside, he was a happening guy. He was a referee for intramural sports. He also played intramural basketball and baseball. When it was time to put work aside, classmates say you could usually find him at parties thrown by his B-school buddies or at Charlie's Kitchen, a local hangout for burgers and beer. Legal Sea Foods restaurant was a favorite destination, too.


End of Quote

Your childish straw man arguments are getting rather stale. I thought this thread was about your President, not Canadian universities. However, I doubt that GWB would have ever been able to get into one of our universities. We do have some rather good nursery schools that may be willing to take him, if the price is right.

Oh, and I see that you have still not figured out how to use the quote function. I wonder if George could do it?

Now, Intrepid, here is some more evidence you can chew on.

If you disagree with the evidence, please be so good as to say EXACTLY WHY!!!

Source- http://www.Vdare.com/sailer/kerry_iq_lower.htm


I just think Americans need to know the truth.

In the long run, however, we do need to think about the quality of the candidates our current primary system is producing. Are these two the best our nation of nearly 300,000,000 can put forward?

Despite Howell Raines's diktat on the natural superiority of the liberal candidate, quoted in my epigraph, there was always room for doubt that Kerry was objectively sharper than Bush. While Bush mangles the English language, Kerry inundates it in dependent clauses. Chris Suellentrop recently reported in Slate how Kerry somehow bloviated the 2,500 crisply-written words his speechwriters handed to him into 5,300 soggily-spoken words.

Bush's 1206 SAT score on the college entrance exam and his C average at Yale have been public knowledge since the last election. (Bush's Graduate Management Aptitude Test score and grades at Harvard Business School, however, are not known.)

Kerry's grades and academic test scores remain wholly unavailable. But we do know that he did not graduate from Yale with honors. His biography by three Boston Globe reporters recounts:

"During his senior year he 'majored in flying,' as Kerry put it, learning aerobatics and performing loop-de-loops instead of focusing on his studies."

After fighting and losing the most expensive Congressional race in the country in 1972, Kerry wound up the next year at a surprisingly non-glittering law school, Boston College. The Boston Globe biography reports:

"A nationally known figure, Kerry was not your typical law student. 'I remember looking up at my first-year class, and sitting there, big as life, was this guy I had seen on television, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and running for Congress,' recalls Thomas J. Carey Jr., one of Kerry's professors. 'He stood out from the beginning.'"

Then three weeks ago, a minister in Florida named Sam Sewell, a Navy veteran and Mensa member who works with gifted children with learning disabilities, pointed out to me that, although no one in the press had noticed it, the Kerry campaign had posted on the Web the Senator's score on the IQ-like test he took when he applied to join the Navy as an officer on February 18, 1966.

After interviewing military psychometricians and reading Defense Department reports from the 1960s on the development of the tests, I can now compare Kerry's score on the Navy's Officer Qualification Test to Bush's score on the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test.

Kerry's PDF file on JohnKerry.com is blurry, but it appears to read:

TEST
FORM
RAW
SCORE
STAND. [?]

SCORE

OFFICER QUALIFI-CATION TEST
7
58
50


To help me make sense out of this, a retired Navy psychometrician advised me to buy from the National Technical Information Service a 1961 technical bulletin called "Development of the Officer Qualification Test, Forms 7 and 8" by Smith, Guttman, Proctor, and Sharp of the Bureau of Naval Personnel.

According to this documentation, the Form 7 of the Navy's OQT that Kerry took in 1966 was a 90-minute pencil and paper test consisting of 35 verbal analogy questions, 30 mechanical comprehension questions, and 50 arithmetic reasoning questions.

Kerry got 58 out of 115 questions right, or 50.4 percent.

The bulletin explained that,

"The Verbal Analogies section emphasizes understanding of conceptual relations rather than knowledge of vocabulary. The Mechanical Comprehension section calls for ability to understand mechanical principles and ability to apply them to visually presented problems. The Arithmetic Reasoning section measures skill in arithmetic reasoning and problem solving, and requires an understanding of basic arithmetic processes."

In the validation process, the test was found to have a satisfactory correlation of about 0.6 with various measures of success in Officer Candidate School.

To standardize this new version of the test when it was developed in the early 1960, it was given to "approximately 1600 applicants to OCS [Officer Candidate School]."

The mean raw score (i.e., number of questions answered correctly) of the preliminary norming group on Form 7 was 57.11?-almost identical to Kerry's 58?-with a standard deviation of 16.14. In other words, Kerry finished almost exactly at the 50th percentile.

(Technically, the "50" on his record appears to refer to his "Navy Standard Score." This is a bell curve-based scoring system where the midpoint is 50 and each standard deviation is 10, so that a score of, say, 60 would fall at the 84th percentile and a score of 70 would fall just below the 98th percentile. In Kerry's case, though, the differences between percentile and Navy Standard Score don't matter, because the midpoint for both scales is 50?-his score on both.)

It's possible that the test slightly underestimated Kerry's overall cognitive ability?-if he is a stronger verbal thinker than mathematical or visual thinker. And this seems likely. He was political science major at Yale and then went to law school, a typical verbalist's career path.

The Navy test was tilted in the opposite direction. When the Navy's OQT was revised in 1961, the number of arithmetic reasoning questions was boosted from 20 to 50 because of "a study by Wollnack and Guttman (1960), which found that quantitative reasoning items were the most valid predictors of OCS performance."

During the 3.5 month-long Officer Candidate School, Kerry outperformed his test score, finishing 80th out of his class of 563.

I found two other class ranks for Kerry. In a ten-week class on damage-control, Kerry ranked 17th out of 33 (p. 2 of this 5 megabyte PDF). In a three-week Command and Control course, he ranked 7th of 22 (p. 4).

So, if Kerry is about as smart as the average applicant to the Navy's Officer Candidate School, how smart is he?

It's certainly nothing to be ashamed of. To take the test, applicants were supposed to be college graduates, or on track toward a four-year degree, or be high scorers on the IQ test for enlisted men, the AFQT. The average IQ of a college graduate is typically close to one standard deviation above the national mean, over the 80th percentile. Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, told me that, in the huge National Longitudinal Study of Youth that was featured in his book, the average college graduate's IQ, as measured by the AFQT, was 114.

(A quick summary of IQ scoring: Scores are assumed to fall according to a "normal distribution," or bell curve, with the average score at 100. Each standard deviation is 15 points. So, a 115 IQ falls at the 84th percentile and a 130 IQ at the 97.7th percentile.)

Perhaps a better way to estimate Kerry's IQ is to look at the average SAT scores of military officers.

A second Navy psychometrician told me about a major study he had conducted:

"I looked at the SAT scores of new officers from 1975 through 1985, by separate fiscal year. For each of the eleven years examined, new officers in the Navy had the highest SAT mean scores (on SAT-Verbal and SAT-Math) among all four services. Overall, including all officers commissioned from 1975 through 1985 combined, SAT scores were as follows:"

1975-1985
SAT-Math
SAT-Verbal
Total
Recentered * (post 1994 scores)

Navy
584
519
1103
1188

Air Force
557
494
1051
1132

Marines
531
487
1018
1113

Army
522
479
1001
1098

Male high school seniors
495
437
932
1032


[* The "recentered" column converts these average scores into the easier scoring system that the College Board adopted in the mid-1990s.]

So, the average SAT score for Navy officers was 1103 (old style).

Of course, the SAT isn't taken by high school dropouts, nor by students who don't intend to go to college. So the true national average would have been much lower, probably around 800 under the old (uninflated) style scoring system.

Can we convert the average Navy officer's SAT score of 1103 into a rough IQ? There's a reasonable correlation between SAT and IQ.

The standard deviation of the SAT was around 230 back then, so if the typical Navy officer scored 1100, or 300 points above the estimated national average of 800, then his IQ was about 1.3 standard deviations above the national average IQ of 100 -- roughly 120, or maybe a little higher, which is in the low 90s on a percentile scale.

Of course, Kerry's OQT score was average for applicants for Officer Candidate School, not for officers, who presumably score better than those who flunk the test. This suggests he might have scored under 1100 on his SAT.

Another complication: it's not clear whether the applicant pool was stronger or weaker when Kerry's version of the test was normed in 1961 than in this 1975-1985 period for which we have data.

The draft was in effect in 1961, so many young men chose to volunteer to be an officer rather than to be drafted into the enlisted ranks. The late 1970s in contrast, were the early years of the all-volunteer military. Recruiting was notoriously difficult and the quality of the military drooped. But then, in the Reagan 1980s, pay increases and revived patriotism brought in better recruits.

An SAT score of 1100 for Kerry seems low, however, because that might have been low enough to keep him out of Yale, which he entered in 1962. I don't know the average SAT score at Yale at that time, but The Bell Curve reports that in 1960, the Harvard freshman class averaged 1373.

Yale turned down Former Senator Bill Bradley, who challenged Al Gore for the Democratic nomination in 2000, despite being an outstanding basketball player, because his SAT-Verbal score was only 485. Bradley was accepted by Princeton and became a Rhodes Scholar. But, although he built a good reputation in the Senate, his dull style during his dismal 2000 Presidential campaign certainly did not disprove his SAT score's validity.

Two years after Kerry's admission to Yale, Bush slid into Yale too. According to a 1999 article in The New Yorker, he had a 566 Verbal - 640 Math, for a 1206 total (which would be about 1280 today). Combined with Bush's mediocre grades in prep school, this meant he was left sweating over whether he'd get in. During spring break in 1964, Bush downplayed expectations by telling friends how much he looked forward to attending the University of Texas, which was his "safety school."

Kerry, being a Forbes, had family pull too?-but certainly no more than Bush, whose father and grandfather were Yalies. And the latter, Prescott Bush, had been U.S. Senator from Yale's state of Connecticut until the year before.

During the 1960s, Yale tightened up entrance requirements for sons of graduates considerably, especially in the year after Bush was admitted. The late historian Jim Chapin, who taught at Yale during those years, told me that the intellectual quality of his students leapt upwards the next year.

This sudden arrival of so many brainy, bookish, leftwing nobodies may be a major reason Bush became so alienated from Yale during his later years there.

Still, it's important to keep in mind that Kerry was admitted two years before Bush?-when admission was even less meritocratic.

(By the way, there is a web page out there that claims that Kerry's SAT score was 1190. That's not implausible, but, unfortunately, the site provides no supporting evidence whatsoever, and I wasn't able to find any confirmation on Google.)

What kind of IQ does Bush's 1206 SAT imply?

Linda Gottfredson, co-director of the University of Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society, told me:

"I recently converted Bush's SAT score to an IQ using the high school norms available for his age cohort. Educational Testing Service happened to have done a study of representative high school students within a year or so of when he took the test. I derived an IQ of 125, which is the 95th percentile."

In other words, only one out of 20 people would score higher.

Charles Murray came up with a similar result:

"I think you're safe in saying that Dubya's IQ, based on his SAT score, is in excess of 120, which puts him in the top 10 percent of the distribution, but I wouldn't try to be more precise than that."

This suggests that applicants to the Air Force Academy averaged about 122.5 (halfway between one and two standard deviations above the average), putting Bush in the 125-130 range -- a little better than his SAT score would suggest.

By way of comparison, Bush's 2000 opponent Al Gore scored 134 and 133 the two times he took an IQ test in high school, putting him just under the top 1 percent of the public.

Not surprisingly, the former vice president's' SAT scores were also strong but not stratospheric: Verbal 625, Math 730, for a total of 1355, which would equate to the upper 130s in IQ.

We can compare Kerry's 50th percentile performance to Bush's performance on the different but reasonably comparable Air Force Officer Qualifying Test.

On January 17, 1968, Bush took the AFOQT. (Just to keep our military acronyms from getting tangled up in a SNAFU, the AFOQT is different from the AFQT or Armed Forces Qualifying Test, which is the IQ portion of the ASVAB or Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery that all applicants for the enlisted ranks take.)

This AFOQT then consisted of 13 subtests that were aggregated into five composites.

Here are Bush's percentile scores (p. 25 of a huge PDF on the USA Today website):

Test Composite
Percentile

Pilot Aptitude
25

Navigator Aptitude
50

Officer Quality
95

Verbal Aptitude
85

Quantitative
65


Bush took the 1966 version of the test. I couldn't find the technical report on that revision, so I bought from NTIS the report on the 1964 revision, "Development and Standardization of the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test-64," by Dr. Robert E. Miller and Dr. Lonnie D. Valentine, two prominent psychometricians at the Lackland Air Force Base.

The percentiles are based on the scores of Air Force Academy candidates during 1955-1960. (To be technical, the 1964 version of AFOQT was renormed using the huge 1960 Project Talent study of high school seniors, but the percentile scores continued to reflect the scores of applicants to the Academy at Colorado Springs.)

This baseline group would appear to be fairly comparable to the Naval OCS applicants against whom Kerry scored at the 50th percentile. The Air Force norm group was typically younger, being high school seniors, than the Navy OCS candidate group, but applicants to the Academies tend to be a little more elite than OCS applicants. For example, the average SAT score of today's Air Force Academy students is 1292 (using the easier post-1994 scoring system), compared to the recentered 1132 of the average Air Force officer during the 1975-1985 period.

How did Bush do? In estimating his IQ, we can probably throw out his high score (the 95th percentile on Officer Quality) and his low score (25th percentile on Pilot Aptitude) because those tests don't measure IQ very directly. Instead, we should concentrate on his Verbal Aptitude (85th percentile), Quantitative (65th), and Navigator Aptitude (50th). In fact, those three are fairly similar in subject matter to the three parts of the Naval OQT that Kerry took: Verbal Analogies, Arithmetic Reasoning, and Mechanical Comprehension, respectively.

The Officer Quality score was derived by combining Bush's score on the 60 item Quantitative Aptitude subtest, the 60 item Verbal Aptitude subtest, with the 100 item Officer Biographical Inventory. The latter was a personality test that asked about "past experiences, preferences, and certain personality characteristics related to measures of officer effectiveness." It inquired into enthusiasm for sports and hunting, and was only vaguely correlated with IQ.

(A retired Air Force test psychologist told me that this section was later dropped because women did very poorly on it, and urban and suburban youths didn't do as well as country boys. "It was politically incorrect, but"?-he recalled wistfully?-"It was a predictor of success as an officer.")

Judging from his scoring at the highest percentile possible on Officer Quality, Bush must have absolutely nailed the Officer Biographical Inventory test, as you might expect coming from his ultra-competitive family.

In contrast, his not having any flying experience dragged down Bush's 25th percentile score in "Pilot Aptitude." He would have scored poorly on the Pilot Biographical Inventory and on Aviation Information, two of the seven subtests for this composite. Many of the other subtests focused on three dimensional imagination capacities, such as the "Visualization of Maneuvers" component. These are valuable mental skills, no doubt, but not ones called upon much in the Oval Office.

So, if you take the average of Bush's percentile scores on the three composites most similar to the test Kerry took, Bush scored at the 67th percentile, a little better than Kerry's 50th percentile.

This isn't an apples to apples comparison, so you can't say that Bush would have done better than Kerry on the same test. But this doesn't provide any evidence in support of the common assumption that Kerry has a much higher IQ.

The standardization report by Miller and Valentine says that the "officer population" that provided the percentile scores was about one standard deviation better than the average 12th grade male on the Verbal subtest and about two standard deviations better on the Quantitative test.

This suggests that the 50th percentile among the norm group of Air Force Academy applicants had an IQ of about 123, thus putting Bush in the 125-130 range?-a little better than his SAT score would imply.


end of quote

BernardR,

I see that you have ignored Yale. No matter. I read your article. Now you can read mine.



At Height of Vietnam, Bush Picks Guard

George W. Bush, right, during his Harvard Business School years. (Harvard Yearbook)


By George Lardner Jr. and Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, July 28, 1999; Page A1


Fourth of seven articles
Two weeks before he was to graduate from Yale, George Walker Bush stepped into the offices of the Texas Air National Guard at Ellington Field outside Houston and announced that he wanted to sign up for pilot training.
It was May 27, 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. Bush was 12 days away from losing his student deferment from the draft at a time when Americans were dying in combat at the rate of 350 a week. The unit Bush wanted to join offered him the chance to fulfill his military commitment at a base in Texas. It was seen as an escape route from Vietnam by many men his age, and usually had a long waiting list.

Bush had scored only 25 percent on a "pilot aptitude" test, the lowest acceptable grade. But his father was then a congressman from Houston, and the commanders of the Texas Guard clearly had an appreciation of politics.

Bush was sworn in as an airman the same day he applied. His commander, Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, was apparently so pleased to have a VIP's son in his unit that he later staged a special ceremony so he could have his picture taken administering the oath, instead of the captain who actually had sworn Bush in. Later, when Bush was commissioned a second lieutenant by another subordinate, Staudt again staged a special ceremony for the cameras, this time with Bush's father the congressman - a supporter of the Vietnam War - standing proudly in the background.

Bush's father went on to run for senator in 1970 against Lloyd Bentsen Jr. - a prominent Texas Democrat whose own son had been placed in the same Texas Guard unit by the same Col. Staudt around the same time as Bush. On Election Day, before the polls closed, Guard commanders nominated both George W. Bush and Lloyd Bentsen III for promotion to first lieutenant - even as the elder Bentsen was defeating the elder Bush.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Back to New England And Another School

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To start at Harvard, Bush needed early release from Guard duty in Texas, and he got it easily, about eight months short of a full six years. A Bush spokesman, Dan Bartlett, said early departures were quite common and, in Bush's case, appropriate because his unit had phased out the F-102s. Bush was transferred to a reserve unit in Boston for the rest of his time, Bartlett noted.
Arriving in Cambridge in September 1973 in his spray-painted Cutlass and scruffy clothes, Bush was not at all what his classmates expected when the word spread that he was indeed the son of the Republican National Committee chairman.

"One of my first recollections of him," says classmate Marty Kahn, "was sitting in class and hearing the unmistakable sound of someone spitting tobacco. I turned around and there was George sitting in the back of the room in his [National Guard] bomber jacket spitting in a cup. You have to remember this was Harvard Business School. You just didn't see that kind of thing."

Classmates vividly remember Bush as an iconoclast and a character, someone who didn't fit the tailored mold of business students in the nation's premier graduate program. Many of the students who arrived that fall, like Bush, had been out of college and working a few years. But unlike Bush, a good number were returning to school with a road map of where they were heading: Wall Street.

Bush's entry into the program came five years after his graduation from Yale, and after a series of dead-end or unfulfilling jobs. He was 27 and clearly had not found his niche yet. "A lot of people went to Harvard Business School . . . for a job and all that. I went there to actually learn. And did," says Bush.

Indeed, many of those closest to him, including his mother, believe Harvard's rigorous academic demands brought his life and potential career into focus. "Harvard was a great turning point for him. I don't think he'd say that as much as I would," said Barbara Bush. "I think he learned what is that word? Structure."

Bush shrugged off the trappings of Harvard and avoided the official clubs that would showcase him in the yearbook and look good on his resume. Instead, he showed up for class looking like he had just rolled out of bed in the morning, often sat in the back of the room chewing gum or dipping snuff and made it clear to everyone he had no interest in Wall Street.

He was one of the few people who posed for his yearbook mug shot in a sports shirt, a wrinkled one at that. The other prominent picture of him in the book showed him sitting in the back row of class with longish hair blowing a huge bubble.

"This was HBS and people were fooling around with the accouterments of money and power," recalled April Foley, who dated Bush for a brief period and has remained friends with him. "While they were drinking Chivas Regal, he was drinking Wild Turkey. They were smoking Benson and Hedges and he's dipping Copenhagen, and while they were going to the opera he was listen to Johnny Rodriguez over and over and over and over."

What Bush wanted to get out of Harvard were some practical business fundamentals. He wanted to do something entrepreneurial, he told his pals, but he wasn't sure what. He mused about running for office but told friends he had to make some money first. Of this everyone was certain: George W. Bush would never end up on the East Coast. He was going back to Texas.


Staff researchers Nathan Abse, Madonna Lebling and Mary Lou White contributed to this report.


© 1999 The Washington Post Company

I read your article and it means NOTHING. There is nothing in it but gossip and anecdotes. If you do not know that anecdotal evidence is the weakest kind of evidence, Intrepid, you know nothing. Now- Comment on the finding of Bush's IQ score! IN THAT ARTICLE YALE IS NOT IGNORED!!!!

All moot points, Bernard. The man is an imbecile regardless of what you present. Nothing you present can make me think differently. If he had the highest IQ in North America, it would not change the fact that he will be remembered as the worst President in U.S. history and one of the goofiest world leaders the world has known.

Good night.

You are, of course, free to think as you wish, Intrepid, but I am certain that the evidence I posted shows that your adolescent ploy of listing comic books shows that your Canadian Education is far far inferior to the kind of Education one receives from Harvard and Yale.

When you decide to try to rebut the statistics and hard evidence given in my last post, let me know.l In the meantime, I would suggest you do some reading. You obviously know very little about US Universities-their admission policies and IQ Test Scores!

Although this was covered in the media ad nauseam a few years ago, I give the following in response to Bernard's charge that I am a liar.


Tuesday, September 14, 2004
[+/-] Bush's Harvard professor remembers a lazy liar

A business school professor who taught Bush at Harvard University in the early 1970s says the future president told him that family friends had pulled strings to get him into the Texas Air National Guard.

Yoshi Tsurumi told CNN that the coward confided in him during an after-class hallway conversation during the 1973-74 school year.
He admitted to me that to avoid the Vietnam draft, he had his dad -- he said 'Dad's friends' -- skip him through the long waiting list to get him into the Texas National Guard. He thought that was a smart thing to do. What I couldn't stand -- and I told him -- he was all for the US to continue with the Vietnam War. That means he was all for other people, Americans, to keep on fighting and dying.
Tsurumi got to know Bush when the future president took his 'Economics EAM' (Environmental Analysis for Management), a required two-semester class from the fall of 1973 to the spring of 1974, Bush's first year at Harvard's business school.

Tsurumi has previously spoken of Bush as a student:

In thirty years you always remember the two kinds of students. One is really good. The other is a George Bush kind. Terrible. Intellectually very shallow. But more importantly immature, but lacking the sense of responsibility, compassion, always indulging in denials when he is called on in his lies. And lies came very easily to him.
Ouch.

Just a reminder that a high IQ, real or imagines, does not make anyone wise. It only means that they have the capacity to learn.

You keep using the straw man about Canadian universities. Maybe you could explain what this has to do with anything. Not only do you support a bad President (although your loyalty is admirable) but you try to draw away from him by bashing Canada. Pity.

Is Bush an idiot? You bet. Unfortunately, that doesn't say much about those who endlessly defend him at every turn.

And then again, maybe it does. :wink:


YES!

Dookie, Dookie, Dookie . . .

















You da man!!!!

Glenn nails it yet again. Why is this so difficult for these wingnuts, supposed law and order fans, to grasp?