SwiftVets.com

[Aristotle The Hun]

A Little History on this story

While I was researching this mission I could not make sense of Bush's AF records. I had Bush's Air Officer Qualification Test scores but I didn't know what they meant. AF Vets on this forum aimed me in the right direction. I found out that Steve Sailor had already researched this issue. Now I knew Bush's IQ - 124 to 128 - superior range.

Now I really hit a bottle neck. Kerry's personal life is locked up as tight as he can make it. His military records aren't the only records he hasn't released. I was stuck. I called out for help like a frustrated child and, of course, everybody's favorite Navy Mother said, "why don't you go look here" with a link supplied. Kerry accidently posted his Navy Officer Qualification Test scores on his web site.

I knew Kerry's IQ because the Navy accepts Navy test scores as qualification for Mensa. I am a Navy vet and familiar with the Navy test scores. Bush 124 to 128 - Superior Range. Kerry 115 to 118 - Bright Normal range.

Then I turned it over to Steve. I never dreamed it would show up in the NYT. After that the story just kept rippleing and growing. I have thought this story was going to run out of legs before, but here it is back again.

Steve got it right about Kerry admitting that he had not made his records public. Steve is a good researcher.

Sam
Bush’s Brain

The candidates’ comparative IQ scores don’t conform to the cliché.

By Steve Sailer

The American Conservative

December 6, 2004 issue

http://www.amconmag.com/2004_12_06/feature.html

For a moment, I thought Sen. John F. Kerry was the exception to the rule that all liberals are secretly obsessed—even though they tell each other they don’t believe in it—with IQ.

The Thursday before the election, Tom Brokaw interviewed Kerry on the “NBC Nightly News” and told him, “Someone has analyzed the president’s military aptitude tests and yours and concluded that he has a higher IQ than you do.”

Kerry instantly dismissed this news with admirable nonchalance, “That’s great. More power.”

I was especially interested in Kerry’s response because that “someone” who had estimated Kerry’s and Bush’s IQs was me. (See http://www.vdare.com/sailer/kerry_iq_lower.htm for details.)

I had long been struck by how so many liberals were convinced that Bush was an idiot compared to Kerry. For example, Howell Raines, the former executive editor of the New York Times, asked: “Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush? I’m sure the candidates’ SATs and college transcripts would put Kerry far ahead.”

Yet the scarlet letters “IQ” had almost never appeared in Raines’s Times. Ten years ago, The Bell Curve proved an enormous bestseller, but the backlash against the book banished IQ from the media. Still, as politically incorrect as cognitive tests have become, colleges and the military have not dropped them. They are simply too useful in sorting large numbers of applicants.

Nor have people stopped talking privately about IQ—especially liberals, who seem to believe, with deepest sincerity, both that IQ is an utterly discredited concept and that liberals are better than conservatives because liberals have much higher IQs.

Democrats constantly sneer at Republicans’ IQs. Misspelling “potato” ended Dan Quayle’s political career, and Google lists 225,000 web pages—few of them complimentary—that include the words “Bush” and “IQ.”

In 2001, some jokers issued a prank press release claiming the (nonexistent) “Lovenstein Institute” had scientifically proven that Bill Clinton has a (Galileo-like) IQ of 182, while George H.W. Bush (who was graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in 2.5 years) had a below average 98 and his son (who has degrees from Yale and Harvard) only a 91. Garry Trudeau fell for this transparent nonsense and shoved it into “Doonesbury.”

Similarly, last May hundreds of liberal websites and even the august Economist magazine succumbed to another IQ hoax, this one claiming that the average IQ in states that voted for Gore was absurdly higher (for example, 113 in Connecticut) than in states that voted Bush (87 in Utah). Immediately following Bush’s victory, this fictitious table spread over the Internet again. (See http://www.isteve.com/IQhoax.htm for my debunking.)

In truth, I don’t believe anybody has measured average state IQs since the huge post-Sputnik Project TALENT study in 1960. If you look instead at a rough proxy such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress achievement tests for public-school eighth graders, you’ll find that Gore states beat Bush states by only a tiny amount.

A more direct comparison of the parties’ voters can be found in the 2000 exit poll, where Bush voters reported an average educational level negligibly greater than Gore voters. Gore did best among high-school dropouts and those who had undertaken postgraduate studies, with Bush leading among those in between. (Many Democrats with advanced degrees, by the way, are public-school teachers with credentials in the easy field of education.)

In the 2002 midterm elections, voters supporting Republican House candidates were particularly well-educated. The GOP won 58 percent to 40 percent among college graduates and even captured a majority among postgrads for the first time in many years.

In 2004, Bush’s majority was more downscale. If you assume that high-school dropouts averaged 10 years of schooling, high-school grads 12 years, those who attended college but didn’t graduate 14 years, college grads 16, and postgrads 18, then Kerry voters claimed 14.64 years of education and Bush voters 14.48 years or only about six weeks less schooling.

Democrats’ denunciations of the president’s IQ bemuse me because Bush strikes me as a lazy but clever and unscrupulous operator who, ever since he quit drinking in 1987, has contrived to get whatever he wants out of life. As I wrote in the Oct. 11 American Conservative in a review of John Sayles’s film “Silver City,” in which Chris Cooper portrays a moronic politician with Bush’s mannerisms, “In the president’s lone losing race, his 1978 run for Congress from West Texas, the victor stressed Bush’s two Ivy League degrees. Bush resolved never to allow himself to be outdumbed again. And the Democrats haven’t outsmarted him since.”

Back in 1999, Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, and I estimated from Bush’s SAT of 1206 (about 1280 under the easier scoring system adopted in 1995) that his IQ fell somewhere around the 95th percentile. The late leftist historian Jim Chapin estimated that Bush’s IQ of roughly 125 probably falls in the second quartile of presidents, a little below average, while Al Gore, who scored about 10 points higher, was in the third quartile. You don’t have to be a genius to be president.

In contrast to Bush, Kerry is from Massachusetts, where intellectual pretensions are popular. Yet there was little hard evidence that Kerry was as brilliant as his flatterers claimed. Unlike Bush, who attended Harvard Business School, Kerry went to plebian Boston College for law school, and his transcripts and test scores appeared to be locked away.

Then a Navy vet named Sam Sewell pointed out to me that the Kerry campaign had posted online an obscure military report giving the cryptic score Kerry had made on the IQ-like test he took when he applied to Officer Candidate School in 1966. After three weeks of research, I determined that Kerry had achieved the average score for applicants to OCS.

In comparison, Bush scored somewhat above average on the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test, which was normed against applicants to the Air Force Academy. Those are both good scores—officer applicants are well above the national average. The two men were clearly fairly similar in mental ability when seniors at Yale. Based on my research into the details of these two similar but different tests, if I had to bet, I’d wager Bush would have scored higher if they had both taken the same test back in the Sixties.

When Kerry insouciantly replied to Brokaw as if he didn’t care what he scored on a 90-minute exam 38 years ago, as if he believed that all that he had accomplished since then was the proper measure of the man, I was impressed.

But then Kerry broke the spell by quibbling about my research, “I don’t know how they’ve done it, because my record is not public. So I don’t know where you’re getting that from.” Evidently, IQ mattered to Kerry, too.

A few days later, Brokaw went on Don Imus’s radio show and revealed just how much it bugged Kerry that I had said Bush probably had a slightly higher IQ. After the cameras had stopped rolling, Kerry had rationalized to Brokaw, “I must have been drinking the night before I took that military aptitude test.”
____________________________________________________

Steve Sailer is TAC’s film critic. He also writes for www.VDARE.com and www.iSteve.com.



Sam
_________________
Deportè Monsieur Kerrè

[Bernard Cullen]

This is excellent research. But as with most things about Kerry there is another layer. The sub-text of the IQ story is what it tells us about Kerry's personality. Again and again, Kerry's behavior suggests an almost pathological level of narcissism. One manifestation of this personality type is the need to hide anything that will be in the slightest way negative or critical. For Kerry it is not enough to be smart, he has to make others assume that he is very smart if not a genius. What is stunning is that with all the benefits of a prep school in Switzerland, a top flight boarding school, Yale, and exposure to the best and brightest - his scores are so mediocre he hides them. Like his non-signing of Standard Form 180, this is another case of "the dog that didn't bark".

I am grateful to all the Swifties who prevented Kerry from becoming POTUS

[MSeeger]

I have to make one tinyobjection here, which has nothing to do with the topic, but does have to do with a statement the author of the article made about most Democrats being public school teachers in the easy field of education.

I don't know where this guy is coming from, or if he has ever tried to teach a room full of fifth graders in an inner-city public school, who don't want to be there, but I can tell you as a public school teacher, that education is far from an easy field to be in, at least below the college level, especially for a person with conservative beliefs. Attitudes like his are what made me wonder why I went into teaching in the first place. And people wonder why there is a serious teaching shortage in this country.

Maria
_________________
Be not deceived, God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. Gal. 6:7

[Tobette]

I'm not a teacher, but I, too, thought the author's words regarding the easy field of teaching, was a bit insulting. I then decided that the author was referring to the courses for qualification, which aren't as difficult as some other fields, not the position in practice.

[Tom Poole]

[Doc Farmer]

[Mary Ann Parker]

Score
Bush v Kerry
Bush's IQ = IDID IT!

Kerry's IQ = I DIDN'T

Your IQ shows you are not what you think you are,
but what you think, you are.

Lesson:
Don't let Bush's conversation mislead you;
there may be more to him than meets the IQ

Listening to Kerry speak makes me WISH I had a LOWER IQ

Some men never know when they have said enough;
others stop when they have reached their intelligent quota

In my humble opinion,
We elected a president who is smarter than US,
so....that makes US smarter than THEM!!! ha ah ha ha hee hee

KERRY has great HEIGHT
What he NEEDS is more DEPTH!!!

Let me see, in this election the lower IQ got the boot
and the higher IQ got the booty!!!!

Ok, my hair hurts. I will quit for now
Mary Ann

[Stevie]

[Me#1You#10]

Be it known, the misspelling of the word "lose" within THIS forum is VERBOTEN and will be dealt with severely

[d19thdoc]

The law of unintended consequences was the real meat on the legs this story had, and the hammer hit two nails at once: Kerry lied (again) about having all his militray records out there, and NBC covered up the admission when it rebroadcast the interview the next night and deleted the admission that ". . . my record is not public."

Both the MSM and Kerry were outed, and, as usual, by Kerry himself. How smart is that?
_________________
For The Honor of the Fifty-Eight Thousand.
"He Can Lose, But He Can Not Hide"

[Aristotle The Hun]

[Tom Poole]

[Steve Z]

Maria Seeger wrote:

[Stop Hanoi John]

I wonder what Steve Sailer would say about this phenomenon I noticed.

After seeing the comparison for state IQ and who that state voted for, I thought I might try a different approach, to see if I could find a stronger correlation.

It didn't take long.

It appears Kerry supporters enjoy taking it up the rear.

http://www.sodomylaws.org/usa/usnews37.htm

Kerry 1. Vermont 97
Kerry 2. Washington, D.C. 92
Kerry 3. Connecticut 81
Kerry 4. New Jersey 70
Kerry 5. Rhode Island 68
Kerry 6. New Hampshire 66
Kerry 7. Massachusetts 64
Kerry 8. Wisconsin 60
Kerry 9. California 54
Kerry 10. Hawaii 42
Kerry 11. Oregon 34
Kerry 12. Minnesota 24
Bush 13. New Mexico 11
Kerry 14. Washington 9
Bush 15. Nevada 8
Kerry 16. New York 6
Bush 17. Wyoming 5
Kerry 18. Maryland 4
Kerry 19. Maine 2
Bush 20. Ohio -4
Kerry 21. Illinois -5
Kerry 22. Delaware -10
Bush 23. Iowa -11
Bush 24. Texas -18
Kerry 25. Michigan -19
Bush 26. Indiana -20
Bush 27. Kentucky -22
Bush 28. Arizona -25
Bush 29. Nebraska -27
Bush 30. Tennessee -30
Kerry 31. Pennsylvania -33
Bush 32. Colorado -35
Bush 33. West Virginia -35
Bush 34. North Dakota -35
Bush 35. South Dakota -37
Bush 36. Montana -37
Bush 37. Georgia -39
Bush 38. Missouri -40
Bush 39. Alaska -40
Bush 40. Louisiana -61
Bush 41. Arkansas -65
Bush 42. Florida -67
Bush 43. South Carolina -70
Bush 44. Utah -77
Bush 45. North Carolina -80
Bush 46. Idaho -80
Bush 47. Kansas -82
Bush 48. Alabama -82
Bush 49. Virginia -87
Bush 50. Mississippi -90
Bush 51. Oklahoma -92

I've asked some Kerry voters for a reBUTTal, but no takers yet.

[ScottyDog]

ROTFL!!!