I really need to read this book:
What proof was there of Gore’s alleged gravitas? How exactly did the media know that Gore was so smart and Bush so dumb? In fact, the record did not indicate any of this was true.
It was often alleged, probably with reason, that Bush only got into Yale because his father had gone there and his grandfather had been a Connecticut senator. Yet Gore, with high school Bs and Cs (his only As were in art), got into Harvard in part because (like other politicians’ sons, including a raft of Kennedys) his father was a famous senator.
At Harvard, Gore’s grades did not improve. In his sophomore year he earned a D, a C-minus, two Cs, two C-pluses and one B-minus. He was in the bottom fifth of his class his first two years in school. Later he flunked out of divinity school (failing five of his eight classes) and dropped out of Vanderbilt University Law School. Gore was once asked (after having served in the U.S. Senate for several years) to name his favourite president. “President Knox,” he replied.
(…)
Then a Navy veteran named Sam Sewell noticed something on the Kerry campaign Web site. In one of the documents posted on the Web page, an obscure military report offered a cryptic score that was actually the result of an IQ-like qualifying test Kerry had taken in 1966. As it happened, George W. Bush had taken the same test just a few years later. Columnist Steve Sailer determined that Bush’s score put him in the 95th percentile, giving him an IQ in the 120s. Kerry’s score was slightly lower, putting him in the 91st percentile.
When these results became public, NBC’s Tom Brokaw asked Kerry about them. He was more than a bit peeved. Kerry dodged the question and wondered out loud how they became public in the first place. “I don’t know how they’ve done it, because my record is not public,” he told Brokaw. “So I don’t know where you’re getting that from.” A few days later, on the Don Imus show, Brokaw revealed just how much it had bugged Kerry that he had been beaten by Bush on the IQ test. After the cameras stopped rolling, Brokaw recalled, Kerry explained, “I must have been drinking the night before I took that military aptitude test.”
(…)
A few months later, another study emerged demonstrating that the average IQ of states that had voted for Gore was much higher than those that went for Bush. (…)
These sensational findings seemingly confirmed what many in the media already believed.
Trudeau ran a Doonesbury strip about it.
The Economist magazine, the St. Petersburg Times, London’s Daily Mirror, radio talk show hosts and liberal bloggers eagerly ran with the story. Urbandude.com typified the liberal attitude when he smugly noted, “I’ve got a Mensa certified IQ of 132.”
But apparently he wasn’t smart enough: Both studies were complete fictions. (“Alas, we were victims of a hoax,” admitted The Economist. “No such data exists.”)
Download the unabridged, talking book version of this book (I earn money every time someone joins Audible through links from my blog):
Or buy the print edition from Amazon.com:
