quote:Originally posted by the G-man: The standard liberal argument on Bush's intelligence is that his verbal misstatements indicate a lack of intelligence.
However, there are, of course, different types of intelligence. This is why, for example, standardized tests often test verbal and mathmatical skill separately.
A person can be possessed of a great verbal dexterity and woefully incapable of analytical thinking. A person can have the soul of a poet and be completely ignorant of, for example, basic economic theory.
In fact, some theorize that the two types of intelligences rarely go hand in hand.
So this is hardly a proper gauge of Bush's intelligence.
And Bush is hardly the only public officer to make verbal gaffes. For example, in one interview, Howard Dean meant to say, in connection with how to govern a postwar Iraq, "the problem now is how to govern, and that's where the real rubber is underneath the road." instead of "that's where the rubber meets the road." You don't see jokes about that everyday, or Dean's "enemies" using it as sigs on message boards.
No, it boils down to what was pointed out earlier: if you don't agree with the elitists on the left, you can't simply have a difference of opinion. You have to be either evil or stupid.
Howard Dean, I don't think has made enough verbal gaffes to fill 3 editions of Deanisms. In fact I don't think even Dan Quayle was that bad.
quote: "I glance at the headlines just to kind of get a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Sept. 21, 2003
quote: "This very week in 1989, there were protests in East Berlin and in Leipzig. By the end of that year, every communist dictatorship in Central America had collapsed." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Nov. 6, 2003
To paraphrase Treebeard. " A President should know better".
