Opinionjournal.com Aug 13, 2001 LINK

BY JAMES TARANTO We Have a Winner

The envelope please. And the World's Laziest Columnist is . . . Gwynne Dyer!

We know what you're thinking: Who the heck is she? Actually, Gwynne's a guy, and according to his bio on this page, he is "one of Canada's media renaissance men, an outstanding journalist, broadcaster, producer, author and filmmaker who now makes his home in London." He claims his syndicated column appears in 150 newspapers, but we found the column that won him this coveted award in only three: Australia's Canberra Times, New Zealand's Southland Times and New Jersey's Newark Star-Ledger.

So how is Dyer lazy? Let us count the ways. First, the premise of his column is the most tiresome cliché around: that President Bush is not too bright. When the Star-Ledger ran the column last Tuesday, it gave it the oh-so-subtle headline "Too Dull-Witted to Lead."

Second, Dyer offers the following "evidence" of Bush's supposed intellectual shortcomings:

IQ tests are notoriously unreliable, and we all know that "IQ" does not correspond very closely to executive ability. But the Lovenstein Institute's conclusions about George W. Bush are nevertheless illuminating.

The Lovenstein Institute, based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, has long published an IQ for each new president, based on his academic performance, writings "achieved without aid of staff," linguistic clarity, and so on.

It's rough and ready stuff, but it awarded Bill Clinton an astonishing IQ of 182 (the average in the U.S. today is around 104), which largely conforms to one's previous impression that the man was useless but brilliant. . . .

At the other end are the Bushes. Even the father only scored 98, but he did seem in charge of his White House. He was, after all, a man with long service in bureaucratic wars and much foreign experience as well. But George W. Bush has no such background, and the Lovenstein Institute estimates his IQ at 91. . . . It is a harsh and an early verdict, but maybe things are spinning out of control just because they are smarter than he is.

There's just one problem, and we'll let the Star-Ledger explain it. On Saturday the Jersey paper ran the following correction (which we couldn't find on its Web site):

A column by Gwynne Dyer on Tuesday's op-ed page contained incorrect information. The column cited a study by the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton, Pa., that concluded President Bush had the lowest IQ of any recent president. There is no Lovenstein Institute in Scranton, Pa., and no such study was conducted.

U.S. News & World Report (fifth item) pegs the "Lovenstein study" as an "Internet hoax," and the excellent Snopes.com urban-legend site has a thorough debunking.

So Dyer is citing a canard to confirm a cliché. But we have not finished plumbing the depths of his intellectual indolence. It turns out even in being duped he was merely being derivative. All of the "information" about the "study" that Dyer included in his "column" had appeared in London's left-wing Guardian nearly three weeks earlier, and Dyer doesn't even "credit" the Guardian for its "reporting"!

We actually saw the Guardian piece back in July and thought about excerpting it for our How Others See U.S. feature. But the story seemed far-fetched to us, so we checked it out by running a Yahoo! search, which turned up no evidence of the institute's existence. Accordingly, we dropped the idea of using the Guardian column.

Now, we don't mean to pat ourselves on the back for our diligence. Conducting that search took us no more than 10 seconds. Our point is that Gwynne Dyer was too lazy to do even that minimal amount of work. Canada's renaissance man indeed.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), August 13, 2001

Answers

I ran across the above article today. Coincidentally I received an email last night from a Dem lady friend with the Lovenstein "report". Her email was titled "Need I say more?".

I immediately checked Google for Lovenstein Institute. No home page. I called Directory Assistance for the phone number of the LI in Scranton. There was no listing. I sent my friend a two line reply: "There is no Lovenstein Institute. Dems are so gullible". She is a friend. I could have said "dishonest".

I think we all know not to believe everything on the Internet. But I was naive enough to think that newspapers still had editors that did fact checking.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), August 13, 2001.

Just for the record, here is the email I received last night. Pathetique.

In a report published Monday, the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton, Pennsylvania detailed its findings of a four month study of the intelligence quotient of President George W. Bush. Since 1973, the Lovenstein Institute has published it's research to the education community on each new president, which includes the famous "IQ" report among others.

According to statements in the report, there have been twelve presidents over the past 50 years, from F.D. Roosevelt to G.W. Bush who were all rated based on scholarly achievements, writings that they alone produced without aid of staff, their ability to speak with clarity, and several other psychological factors which were then scored in the Swanson/Crain system of intelligence ranking.

The study determined the following IQs of each president as accurate to within five percentage points:

147 Franklin D. Roosevelt (Dem) 132 Harry Truman (Dem) 122 Dwight D. Eisenhower (Rep) 174 John F. Kennedy (Dem) 126 Lyndon B. Johnson (Dem) 155 Richard M. Nixon (Rep) 121 Gerald Ford (Rep) 175 James E. Carter (Dem) 105 Ronald Reagan (Rep) 098 George HW Bush (Rep) 182 William J. Clinton (Dem) 091 George W. Bush (Rep)

Among comments made concerning the specific testing of President GW Bush, his low ratings were due to his apparent difficulty to command the English language in public statements, his limited use of vocabulary (6,500 words for Bush virsus and average of 11,000 words for other presidents), his lack of scholarly achievements other than a basic MBA, and an absence of any body of work which could be studied on an intellectual basis. The complete report documents the methods and procedures used to arrive at these ratings, including depth of sentence structure and voice stress confidence analysis.

The Lovenstein Institute of Scranton Pennsylvania think tank includes high calibre historians, psychiatrists, sociologists, scientists in human behaviour, and psychologists. Among their ranks are Dr. Werner R. Lovenstein, world re-nowned sociologist, and Professor Patricia F. Dilliams, a world-respected psychiatrist.

The study was commissioned on February 13, 2001 and released on July 9, 2001 to subscribing member universalities and organizations within the education community.

Interestingly, the mean average IQ of the Democrat Presidents is 156 whereas the mean of the Republicans is 115. Right-wing people are less intelligent? Something we all know, but there's the statistical evidence

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), August 13, 2001.

The IQ scores given would have been immediate red flags for me. Clinton a 182? Get real. Both Bushes below 100? Neither one is that dumb.

-- Buddy (buddydc@go.com), August 13, 2001.

THIS is the content of the thread that I locked TWICE on TB2K, that act causing me to be lambasted in another thread here.

So the fact that I said the study was "bull", and that discussing it was a waste of bandwidth is meaningless. I had somehow been guilty of "censorship".

Too funny...

-- Dennis Olson (djolson@pressenter.com), August 15, 2001.

Dennis,

Stopping discussion of a subject because you think the subject is "bull" is, in fact, censoring.

As you said, too funny...

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), August 15, 2001.

So Unk, let me see if I have this right....

Stopping discussion of meaningless information from a non- existant "institute" is somehow "wrong"?

(So why did YOU arbitrarily start deleting posts made by people who failed to put "I love you" - or some such nonsense - in each post? Plus, I've seen you post on more than one occasion, "This is MY board, and I'll do what I want to." Seems to me that you are MUCH more of an arbitrary censor than *I* am.)

Yeah, too funny, but not for the reason YOU think...

-- Dennis (djolson@pressenter.com), August 15, 2001.

The Lovenstein Institute may not exist, and the material attributed to them may have originated from "The Onion" or one of its writers, but what's important is the plausibility of the material to each of those who read it.

For some decades, it has been standard media practice to depict Presidents as being "brilliant but flawed" if they are Democrats, and "mentally challenged puppets of venal advisors" if they are Republicans. No, those exact phrases aren't used, but the sense of them is clearly projected. Reagan was a doofless, amiable dunce. Carter was a brilliant man who wore himself out trying to micromanage the entire government. And so on.

So what's interesting (and all discussion should be welcome) is that people supporting both parties took it seriously, rather than seeing through its inherent absurdity. We have been set up to do so. The power of long-term media characterizations should not be underestimated.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), August 15, 2001.

No Dennis, you don't have it right. I did not say it was WRONG, I said it was censoring, and it is. And yes, I've done it too, but I'm not confused about what it is.

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), August 15, 2001.

The Lovenstein Institute may not exist,

Interesting that everyone concludes that the Lovenstein Institute doesn't exist because it doesn't have a web page or a public phone number. Criteria for authenticity. Will have to think that one over?

Unk, Dennis has you on this one.

Best Wishes,,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), August 15, 2001.

I love you Unk.

I love you Dennis.

-- helen's graffiti (scrawling@on.the.walls), August 15, 2001.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/2000/y2k/jan00/survive02010100.asp

-- Back (to@the.future), August 15, 2001.

Z,

Horseshit. Dennis said he halted discussion of an issue, but failed to understand that his action was censoring. "I am stopping you from talking about this, but I am not censoring you?"

I corrected him.

And now I have corrected you. I win.

Best wishes back at ya.

( :P

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), August 15, 2001.

Unk:

Horseshit back at you. Deleting for content is deleting for content. Some folks have to credibility in this area and some don't. We just have to be honest about it.

Anyway, it is not that important.

Hope things are fine down in Florida. I read on the other board that Florida will be washed away in a giant storm. I think that it is in Revelations. *<)))

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), August 15, 2001.

Z,

Where was I not being honest? I don't deny deleting for content, nor am I confused that doing so is censoring.

BTW, thanks for your concern about FL, but we'll be fine here. I have shutters. Having shutters wards off storms in a kind of reverse Murphy's Law way, just like I single handedly warded off Y2K by having lots of canned ravioli. But has anyone thanked me? No.

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), August 15, 2001.

What do Dennis and Z have in common?

They both swore they would never post here at Unk’s again. So much for their credibility.

Crybabies

Just my opinion.

-- Just (my@2.cents), August 15, 2001.

keep your colon clean!!!!!!

-- al-d. (dogs@zianet.com), August 15, 2001.

Thank you, Unk, for warding off y2k with ravioli. As a token of my appreciation, I wish to give you one half-ton of rice.

-- helen (doing@our.part), August 15, 2001.

UnK:

You store canned ravioli. Reminds me of an experience from my younger days. We were looking for overdue campers in the desert. We found them; they were in bad shape. Water they liked. They looked at canned ravioli like it was the spore of the devil [which it is]. Forunately, we also had something like the modern MRE which they would eat.

Only shape-shifting reptiles eat canned ravioli.

Best Wishes,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), August 15, 2001.

Shape-shifting reptile huh? That must explain why I can eat it cold.

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), August 15, 2001.