The John Kerry Post of the Day

My latest discovery about my favorite cheese-eating surrendermonkey-looking Ketchup King cum Presidential candidate:

This just in -- the President has a higher IQ than Senator Ketchup. Don't believe me? Steve Sailer's done the research...

Similarly, in 2001, many liberals, including Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau and The Guardian newspaper, fell for the notorious "Lovenstein Institute" prank, which absurdly claimed that the IQ of Bush, a man with two Ivy League degrees, was a sub-average 91, while Bill Clinton's was a Galileo-like 182.

But now I've turned up some hard facts about the IQs of Kerry and Bush.

Most significantly, at the age of 22, both men took the IQ-type tests required of candidate military officers. (The U.S. military, which has studied the predictive power of IQ in vastly more detail than any other institution, remains intensely dedicated to the value of intelligence testing.)
Bush's scores on the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test have been briefly mentioned in the press. But no-one before now has fully explained what they mean.

And, even more important, this is first article to publish Kerry's score on the Navy's Officer Qualification Test.

The two tests aren't perfectly comparable. But they provide no evidence that Kerry is smarter. If anything, Bush is smarter than Kerry.

Maybe Ketchup Boy's inability to concisely state his points is evidence of an underlying problem. As Chris Suellentrop points out at Slate, Kerry's incapable of keeping things simple...

The campaign gives reporters the text of each of Kerry's speeches "as prepared for delivery," apparently to show how much Kerry diverges from them. During his stump speeches and town halls, Kerry makes the occasional Bush-style error, such as the time I saw him tell a blind man in St. Louis that he would "look you in the eye." Tuesday night in Dayton, Ohio, Kerry tried to thank teachers for spending money out of their own pockets on students, but instead it came out as a thank-you to Mary Kay Letourneau as he said, "And they're putting out for our kids." His pronunciation of "idear" grates on my ears far more than Bush's "nucular." But the authentic Kerryism emerges only when he gives a formal address.

Kerry proves incapable of reading simple declarative sentences. He inserts dependent clauses and prepositional phrases until every sentence is a watery mess. Kerry couldn't read a Dick and Jane book to schoolchildren without transforming its sentences into complex run-ons worthy of David Foster Wallace. Kerry's speechwriters routinely insert the line "We can bring back that mighty dream," near the conclusion of his speeches, presumably as an echo of Ted Kennedy's Shrum-penned "the dream will never die" speech from the 1980 Democratic convention. Kerry saps the line of its power. Here's his version from Monday's speech in Tampa: "We can bring back the mighty dream of this country, that's what's at stake in these next two weeks."

Kerry flubs his punch lines, sprinkles in irrelevant anecdotes, and talks himself into holes that he has trouble improvising his way out of. He steps on his applause lines by uttering them prematurely, and then when they roll up on his TelePrompTer later, he's forced to pirouette and throat-clear until he figures out how not to repeat himself. He piles adjective upon adjective until it's like listening to a speech delivered by Roget.

Man, four years with State of the Unions by this guy might drive us insane.