Phil Reisman

Presidential Intelligence Quotient Hoax

October

Thanks to the Internet, or as President George W. Bush would say, “the internets,” urban legends are alive and well and spreading faster than ever.

There’s one going around in an e-mail chain (I got one last week) that features the Commander-In-Chief himself—and it hardly casts him in a flattering light.

It involves a “study” of presidential I.Q. performed by a think tank called the “Lovenstein Institute of Scranton” which is supposedly made up of highly regarded historians, sociologists, human behavorial scientists and head shrinks including one Dr. Wernver R. Lovenstein.

The, uh, Institute purports to have discerned the I.Q.s of the past 12 U.S. presidents through a four-month examination of their writings, their ability to speak with clarity and other “psychological factors,” and putting the whole mess through some nutty equation called the “Swanson/Crain System” to determine just how strong or weak the Executive brain power has been in the last 50 years. Get this—it’s accurate within five “percentage” points. Wow.

Here’s the ranking:
182- Bill Clinton
175- Jimmy Carter
174- John F. Kennedy
155- Richard Nixon
147- Franklin D. Roosevelt
132- Harry Truman
122- Dwight Eisenhower
121- Gerald Ford
105- Ronald Reagan
98- George Herbert Walker Bush
91- George Walker Bush

I love this…it’s got hoax written all over it.

W may be dumb, but he’s not retarded. This thing makes him to be dumber than a rock. And I’ve seen JFK’s I.Q., reported in a published story about him and it was a lot lower than 174.

I’ve check this out through the great hoax debunker, Snopes.com, and it turns out this urban legend has been out there since 2001 and has successfully fooled the London Guardian and a publication in New Zealand. Apparently, it’s out there again, so don’t be sucked in by it, as genuine as it may seem.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 12:55 pm by LoHudBlogs.com Admin.
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One Response to “Presidential Intelligence Quotient Hoax”

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