Bush Smarter than Kerry?

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Bush Smarter than Kerry?
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Fri, 08-06-2004 - 8:57pm

'THE KERRY BRAIN


http://dbsoxblog.blogspot.com/#109162538493538368


Something’s been bothering me about John Kerry. I just don’t think he’s that smart.

One of the axiomatic dynamics of this presidential race has been that Bush is a dolt while Kerry is highly intelligent. But if Kerry is so bright, where has he been hiding his allegedly fearsome intellect? Does “I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it” sound like the workings of a brilliant mind? And yet the Adam Nagourneys of the world continue to insist that Kerry is remarkably “complex” with an uncanny sense for nuance. But I’ve come to a conclusion: He’s not particularly smart.

Let’s take a look at his academic record for illustration. As a control for our study, let’s use another party who for the purposes of this analysis we’ll call George W. Bush. As we all know, Ivy League admission back in the 60’s and 70’s was highly political. If you had the right connections, your ticket was all but punched. Thus, Kerry and Bush had no trouble gaining admission to Yale. Both hailed from the same prestigious prep school and had a surfeit of family “pull.”

At Yale, Bush was a famously indifferent student. Once out of Yale, Bush was an even more famously indifferent national guardsman. And yet a few years after emerging from New Haven, Bush gained admission to Harvard Business School, no doubt thanks to family connections and an academic performance that though quite unimpressive suggested that he would be able to handle the work at HBS.

Now the allegedly big-brained Kerry graduated Yale a couple of years before Bush. Kerry, unlike the President, is not a famously dunderheaded student; he was supposed to be blessed with his preternatural sense for nuance in the crib. After graduating Yale, Kerry burnished his resume by being a war hero first and a media star second. So after this impressive performance, where did he go to law school? Boston College.

(None of what follows is intended as a slight towards Boston College or its law school. B.C. is a wonderful institution that has produced many wonderful graduates including Michael Adams and Doug Flutie.)

If you’re not from Boston, you might be unaware of the following truth: No one here, in spite of Boston College’s undeniable strengths, would eschew an invitation to attend Harvard Law School to attend B.C. It’s simply not done. Thus we can reasonably infer that Kerry did not get in to Harvard Law.

And that’s remarkable. Given his family connections and his post graduate work both in the war and later protesting it, his admission should have been a given. The only thing that would explain Kerry not getting into Harvard would be that he performed dreadfully at Yale. Indeed, he would have had to perform at a level that would have raised the prospect that he couldn’t handle the work at Harvard. His efforts were probably so weak, they could even be described as sub-Bushian.

The reason this matters is because a key subtext for the Kerry campaign is that he’s smarter than the incumbent. The Senator, with his ear for subtlety and his eye for complexity would have seen through intelligence errors that fooled the rest of the world. Or so his campaign would have you believe.

I’ve scrutinized Kerry’s record searching for evidence of his purportedly giant intellect. I’ve found none. His academic biography includes no Latin words like “laude” or “magna.” Who knows? Maybe Kerry’s just being modest and doesn’t want to boast about decades old accomplishments. But I doubt it.

Of course, the Kerry campaign could prove me wrong by releasing transcripts of his time at Yale and Boston College. What about it, Kerry campaign – care to weigh in on this?


(Correction: Bush and Kerry did not go to the same prep school. One went to St. Paul, the other to Andover. I can't keep straight who went to which - sorry.)'

Renee ~~~

Renee ~~~

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iVillage Member
Registered: 04-05-2003
Fri, 08-06-2004 - 9:12pm
Today's news showed a clip of Bush giving a campaign speech where he said, "Everyday the terroists are thinking up ways to harm us, and so are we."

Sounds pretty intelligent to me.

The sad part is that he is telling the truth this time.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-04-2003
Fri, 08-06-2004 - 9:17pm
<<“I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it” sound like the workings of a brilliant mind?>>

This is getting old. He has explained this vote numerous times. Here is one in his own words from an interview he gave on Larry King Live:

<

KERRY: I voted against that support at that time as a statement that we should get the policy right. And because they were unwilling to fund it in an appropriate way.

Joe Biden and I offered an amendment and said, "Let's ask all Americans to share in the cost of this war." And rather than have a $690 billion tax cut over the next 10 years, why don't we just settle for a $600 billion tax cut and we can pay without adding to the deficit for this entire war? The Republicans and George Bush rejected that shared sacrifice. And I said that's wrong, and that's why I voted against it.>>

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Fri, 08-06-2004 - 9:42pm
And even the biggest blockhead pol with half the time Kerry has served in the senate should have known not to phrase his response that way.

Renee ~~~

Renee ~~~

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-12-2004
Sat, 08-07-2004 - 2:02am
LOL!

that is good. I mean, hey, lets trust our judgement here. It does not take a rocket scientist to be president. John Kerry is no nuclear physicist, but he can articulate his own thoughts and that represents a mind that can think, and process information. Watching George Bush after he was being told about 9/11 tells me he has very little brain function going on. heck, watching him after he is asked any question is hilarious.
iVillage Member
Registered: 07-05-2003
Sat, 08-07-2004 - 2:16am
John Kerry recently was on Larry King Alive, and Larry King asked him, "Where were you?" (on 9/11) Here's Kerry's answer. "I was in the Capitol. We'd just had a meeting. We'd just come into a leadership meeting in Tom Daschle's office looking out at the capitol. As I came in Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid were standing there, and we watched the second plane come into the building we shortly thereafter sat down at the table and then we just realized, nobody could think, and then boom, right behind us we saw the cloud of explosion at the Pentagon, and then word came from the White House that they were evacuating, and we were to evacuate, and so we immediately began the evacuation."





That's what John Kerry did on 9/11. "Shortly thereafter sat down at the table and then we just realized nobody could think, and then, boom, right behind us the Pentagon gets hit. So we were told to evacuate, and we evacuated." Okay, how long did they just sit there and think? It should be noted the second plane hit the World Trade Center at 9:03. So Kerry says we watched the second plane come into the building. He's talking about the World Trade Center there, so that happened at 9:03. The plane hit the Pentagon at 9:43. So by virtue of John Kerry's own words he and his fellow senators sat there for 40 minutes realizing, quote, "Nobody could think."

Thus unlike the 7 minutes Bush spent keeping children calm in school, allowing the secret service to prepare to speed him to airforce 1 (note a technique used by Al-Queda in Turkey was to create a traffic jam then explode a truck by a target which becomes a sitting duck, it takes the secret service a few minutes to assess it has a clear path or viable alternative routes to prevent getting the President stuck as a sitting duck for a terrorist). This Mr. Moore makes quite a thing over... yet Kerry the smarter guy... sits in a trance unmoving, not noticing time passing by... yup... what's what the smarter better guy does... goes into coma... wow... imagine Moore clocking 40 minutes of Kerry staring with his mouth open. Hmm... who had the better response... Bush allowing the secret service to give him a clear... or Kerry who on seeing america under attack (something Bush didn't see) sat in coma for 40 minutes... :-) It's not that hard to see who was functional in this situation and who was a lump in a chair :-o

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Sat, 08-07-2004 - 8:00am

In 1962, Kerry entered Yale University. There he majored in political science and graduated with a B.A. in 1966.


>"So after this impressive performance, where did he go to law school? Boston College."<


John Kerry entered Boston College Law School at Newton.


Boston College Law School was founded in 1929. It is located in Newton, Massachusetts. It has approximately 800 enrollees.


Boston College Law School is among the top six law schools in the country in the number of applications it receives, and has an overall applicant-to-acceptance ratio that is among the most selective in the nation.


That something lies in the history and tradition of legal education at Boston College Law School, which holds that lawyers should be neither hired guns unconcerned with moral questions, nor pure theorists hovering above the fray. The 270 men and women who earn the degree of Juris Doctor there each year are as well-versed in courtroom procedure as they are in legal history, as well-prepared to practice law as they are to discuss its theoretical underpinnings. Many have already had extensive experience researching and arguing cases through programs such as the Criminal Process, Attorney General or other clinical programs, and in advocacy competitions and classroom simulations. But for them, neither zealous advocacy nor the exercise of legal scholarship is an end in itself.


When Boston College Law School was founded in 1929 at 11 Beacon Street in downtown Boston, the first dean, Dennis Dooley, envisioned a law school with a social conscience as well as an analytical mind. From its earliest days, Boston College Law School had a reputation for toughness and high standards. It won accreditation from the American Bar Association in 1932, just three years after its founding, joining the Harvard, Yale, and Boston University law schools as the only ones in New England to attain such a distinction. Academic standards were so high that in some years, as many as two-thirds of the first-year class would be excluded for poor scholarship. But the quest for academic excellence was also shaped by a desire to educate lawyers who worked for social justice and reform.



Seven decades have seen much change in Dean Dooley's law school-it now spreads across a 40-acre campus in Newton, Massachusetts, and ranks among the nation's premier law schools.


More........


http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Boston_College_Law_School

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Sat, 08-07-2004 - 8:29am
Okay...a) John Kerry is not the President of the United States (yet) and so there was nothing pressing waiting for him to do, like say give the order to shoot down the planes BEFORE all the planes had already crashed.

b) there was not a roomfull of people either right next to him or in Washington waiting to answer all of his questions in detail about the attack that was unfolding. Bush should have been just itching for information, but instead he seemed to linger in the classroom, even after the reading event was over.

and c) you're making up some sort of fiction about the Secret Service waiting to get Bush out of the room. As soon as the second plane hit, the Secret Service officer in charge is reported to have said "That's it, he's out of here" (meaning the President) but was obviously overridden by someone. The idea of al Qaeda somehow causing a traffic jam in that part of Florida is ridiculous. They were less than ten minutes from the airport. Plus, if they were concerned that the President was a target, why would they leave him in a room full of school children, thus placing their lives in danger?

There's miles of difference between Kerry saying "nobody could think" and your assertion that he was in a "coma." C'mon.

Here's a good link to a timeline of President Bush's day on 9/11.

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/essayaninterestingday.html

from that site:

"Bush did not say one word. He did not ask Card any questions. He did not give any orders. He did not know who (or which country) was attacking, whether there would be more attacks, what military plans had been taken, what military actions should be taken - indeed, he knew virtually nothing about what was going on outside the room. He just sat there. Bush later recalled: "There was no time for discussion or anything." Even stranger, as one newspaper put it, although the nation was under terrorist attack, "for some reason, Secret Service agents not bustle him away."

Military pilots must have "permission from the White House because only the president has the authority to order a civilian aircraft shot down." But if retaliatory strikes needed to the authorized, Bush was not available. If one of the planes had to be shot down to save more lives on the ground, Bush was not available. Although several fighters had been dispatched to defend New York City, the pilot of one of the planes flying to catch Flight 175 later noted that it wouldn't have mattered if he caught up with it, because only Bush could order a shootdown, and Bush could not be reached in the classroom.

Bush not long after being told of the second plane crash.

Secret Service agents and other security personnel had set up a television in a nearby classroom. They turned on the TV just as Flight 175 crashed into the World Trade Center. According to Sarasota County Sheriff Bill Balkwill, who was in the room, a Marine responsible for carrying Bush's phone immediately said to Balkwill, "We're out of here. Can you get everyone ready?" But he must have been overruled by someone, because Bush did not leave.

Meanwhile, Secret Service agents burst into Vice President Cheney's White House office. They carried him under his arms - nearly lifting him off the ground - and propelled him down the steps into the White House basement and through a long tunnel toward an underground bunker. Accounts of when this happened vary greatly, from 9:06 to after 9:30. Cheney's own account is vague and contradictory. The one eyewitness account, by White House photographer David Bohrer, said it happened just after 9:00. It's easy to see why the White House would have wanted this event placed at a later time (after Bush's initial statement to the nation rather than after the second crash) to avoid the obvious question: if Cheney was immediately evacuated, why wasn't Bush?"

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-24-2004
Sat, 08-07-2004 - 8:31am
Democratic president FDR left Harvard Law School and attended Columbia Law School. His family was rich and his cousin was the President of the U.S.(strings could have been pulled to keep him in Harvard), so in the eyes of republicans becuase he did not recieve good grades at Harvard and graduated from Columbia means he was not smart and was not a great leader?
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Sat, 08-07-2004 - 8:32am
And that's your proof that he's secretly a complete moron? One campaign trail slip up? Nice try, but no dice.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Sat, 08-07-2004 - 8:37am
BC is also a Jesuit school, which probably appealed to Kerry, being a Catholic and just having come back from the war. The Jesuits are a very peaceful, scholarly and as priests go, worldly, religious order. It seems to be a perfect match for a young John Kerry.

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