I did not intend my post to be read as a reference to anything but the essential question. I posted from the post reply link on the 1st page of the thread. The juxtaposition was bad happenstance.
S’all right. You are not in trouble.
OTOH, you might want to look around when posting random thoughts to be sure they do not appear to be commentary on other posters.
Even a simple heading “Re: GWB” would have made it clear you were not posting commentary on the previous post.
I’ve been lurking on this thread for a while. My $0.02 is that I don’t like Dubya or his policies, but an IQ of about 120 sounds right to me. Not a genius, and maybe not as smart as I’d like my president to be, but definitely not dumb. I’m posting mainly to comment on “stupid is as stupid does,” which has been advanced several times. IMHO, that’s wrong. Let’s remember The Bay of Pigs. JFK was plenty bright. He made a mistake in judgment. So, too, did Dubya (again, IMHO), in taking us into Iraq in the face of world opinion. Do I disagree? You betcha! Does that make him stoopid? Well, no.
Sure, but what else is there really to go by?
We can definitely debate the fine points and unknowables all day long. But, at the end of the day there’s not really much that can be done to answer the question.
A couple of my very, very good friends each blew the top ends off of IQ and standardized tests and have almost a whole alphabet of letters behind their names between 'em, but there are some things that they do in their everyday lives that, well… I don’t know what to say.
The point is, that even though tests and degrees can be indicators of certain mental faculties, these faculties are not the be all and end all of what’re “smarts.” If GWB were a personal friend of mine, I don’t think I would count him among the “smart ones” mostly because he seems not to have the wide ranging intellectual interests that I associate with “smart” folks.
Perhaps I’d consider him merely “clever.”
All that said, I don’t think he’s “dumb” either.