unrepentant old hippie

Is Bush an idiot?

This was the burning question on Tuesday night's "Scarborough Country". (See the video on "Crooks & Liars".) Like most people, I automatically thought "Do bears shit in the woods? Is the pope Catholic? Did Dick Cheney shoot an old man in the face?" but a little research revealed that Bush is not actually an idiot, he is a developmentally-disabled moron. According to the original Binet-Simon IQ classifications:

"Idiots" have IQs of 0-20; they're so challenged that they can hardly talk (I know, I know, but I mean utter drooling gibberish here, not Bush-isms). They have limited motor skills -- difficulty walking, difficulty with simple tasks. An idiot couldn't eat a bowl of cereal without repeatedly jamming the spoon in his eye. Bush can walk, he can talk (after a fashion), and he manages to get most food down his gullet without choking (pretzels notwithstanding). So clearly, Bush is intellectually superior to an Idiot.

"Imbeciles" are a step up on the stupidity scale with IQs of 21-49. They have better motor skills and speak with actual words, but can't put them together very well (oh-oh). The average dog probably has a wider vocabulary. They can manage spoons under supervision. At first I thought this might be the right category for George, but he usually manages to string words together into actual sentences. And he probably has a better vocabulary than most dogs (I'm not including Border Collies in this assessment).

"Morons", the most intelligent of the least intelligent among us, boast IQs of 50-69, a definite edge over Imbeciles and absolutely stellar compared to Idiots. A Moron is what's known as "developmentally disabled" in PC terms. According to Wikipedia, the developmentally disabled exhibit these traits:

• they have trouble speaking (reams of evidence on this point)
• they find it hard to remember things ("Ken Lay? Who?")
  
• they have trouble understanding social rules (you don't massage other heads of state at important meetings, and you don't address them as "Yo, Blair")
  
• they have trouble discerning cause and effect (see Iraq, "war on terror")
• they have trouble solving problems and/or thinking logically (see Iraq, "war on terror")

Sound familiar?

So Bush isn't an Idiot, he's a Moron. I kind of wish he was an idiot... he'd probably be far less dangerous.