Does it ever scare you that you're smarter than the president? I posed this question to my girlfriend recently. We both agreed that it was, indeed, scary to be smarter than Little W. I suppose people in Mensa have this experience all the time, but except for George the elder and Ron Reagan, I've never had any reason to suspect that the president wasn't smarter than me. George the younger officially joins that elite group of exceptions.
Not everyone believes it's important for the president to be the sharpest cheddar in the dairy, and several of our most revered presidents were hardly eggheads, as my grandfather would have said: Harry Truman, a high school graduate, worked for the railroad and was a farmer, among other working-class occupations, and FDR was characterized by Oliver Wendell Holmes as "a second-rate intellect."
While we don't have IQ data for Bush, I don't think anyone would mistake him for a man of towering intellect. But as columnist Aubrey Immelman of the St. Cloud Times succinctly put it, what really matters is not so much what Bush's cognitive capacity is but, rather, "whether he possesses the emotional intelligence—the triumph of reason over rigidity and restraint over impulse—to steer the course." Granted, Bush hasn't been in office all that long—and it's an even shorter amount of time if you take into account that he's been on vacation 40% of his presidency so far, according to Molly Ivins last month—but at this juncture, I'd have to say that impulse and rigidity are pretty much kicking the butts of restraint and reason.
Consequently, the producers of Fear Factor haven't got anything over Bush when it comes to manufacturing apprehension. What has me alarmed is that not only do I know that declaring war on the terrorists will only inflame the folks who already hate us but high school and college students interviewed on TV know it as well. Now I'm neither a foreign policy nor security expert, but W. and his pal Rumsy seem to be relying on old reruns of The Andy Griffith Show in which Opie is instructed to stand up to the bullies who will then back down, seeing that the boy's got gumption. Part of the problem here is that the bully isn't some burly kid with a striped t-shirt and dungarees. Rather, what the guys—and I feel that since we routinely see Bush in jeans and a cowboy coat on the ranch I can justifiably call him a guy—what the guys are about to do is swat at a swarm of angry bees—bees with high-powered weapons and enough smarts to use our own airplanes as attack missiles.
This just doesn't seem like a good idea to me. I don't mean to suggest that we should simply shrug our shoulders and let the perpetrators off the hook, but you'd think by now it would be pretty clear that fighting violence with violence isn't the answer. You might beat the enemy back for awhile, but they just regroup and come back in some new configuration but with the same old grudges. What's that old saying? If you lie down with dogs, you'll wake up with fleas.
Wasn't it just under daddy's watch that the U.S. government was funding Osama bin Laden as a freedom fighter? An ex-girlfriend of mine said to Kathy once, when we were having relationship problems, if they'll do it for you, they'll do it to you. I scoffed at the time, but darned if bin Laden hasn't proved her right. But the guys've learned their lesson, right? So it's OK. Chya, right!
That's why there's talk now of arming the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan—like when we gave military support to Iraq in the 1980s in its war against Iran? Hmmm—I wonder how that turned out ... . I seem to recall fighting against Iraq not long ago. With feats of reasoning like the above, it's no wonder so many folks ( myself included ) initially fell for the faux report generated by "the Lovenstein Institute" that suggested that Bush's IQ was 91, based, it said, on "his apparent difficulty to command the English language in public statements, his limited use of vocabulary ( 6,500 words for Bush versus an average of 11,000 words for other presidents ) , [ and ] his lack of scholarly achievements."
I guess how one would fight terrorists doesn't figure into the average IQ test, but it sure would be nice to have a president that could think "outside the box" when it comes to solving the terrorist problem. I'm not sure the president we've got even knows there's a box.
