FOX

'Doonesbury' Creator Apologizes for Citing Bush IQ Hoax

"Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau apologized on the strip's Web site for using an Internet hoax on presidential IQs as the basis for Sunday's strip.

The strip, a purported conversation between an unseen President George W. Bush and an adviser in the White House, cites as fact a purported ranking of presidential IQs based on public statements and writings. In the "study," Bush is said to have an IQ half that of former president Bill Clinton and a little more than half the average presidential vocabulary.

The strip's Web site quotes outraged comments, acknowledges that the ranking was an Internet hoax and calls citing it "a regrettable error, although perhaps inevitable, given that this feature uses the same fact-checking house as Saturday Night Live and The Drudge Report."

The Drudge Report first reported Trudeau's error on Sept. 2 saying "Garry Trudeau is so determined to undermine President Bush — he's now resorting to using a phony Internet IQ study of American presidents."

"Trudeau takes full responsibility, acknowledging the use of fictional material from an outside source instead of simply making it up as he usually does," the site says.

"The creator deeply apologizes for unsettling anyone who was under the impression that the President is, in fact, quite intelligent," the site says. [Some apology!!! Arsehole. Sorry. No, I'm not, he's an arsehole.]

"Gary's good about his own kind of fact-checking before he puts something out, but in this case it fell down," said senior editor Alan McDermott of Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes the strip.

McDermott said Trudeau told editors in an e-mail that a "usually reliable" source had pointed out the purported study to him. He said Trudeau was considering dealing with the hoax in a future daily strip.

The purported study, which announces that Bush had the lowest IQ of any president in the last 50 years, has also been cited by a columnist for London's prestigious Guardian newspaper [well-known left-wing paper] and in Australian and New Zealand newspapers through another syndicated columnist.

The supposed study quotes a "Lovenstein Institute" of Scranton, Pa., and cites several so-called "world renowned" authorities using something called the "Swanson/Crain system of intelligence ranking."

The purported institute is not listed in the Scranton phone book and other researchers have said they have never heard of either the research system or the alleged authorities cited.

Bush was assessed with an IQ of 91, half of Clinton's supposed 182, and while the average presidential "working vocabulary" was said to be 11,000 words, Bush was said to have one of only 6,500 words.

In the "Doonesbury" strip, an outraged Bush asks how such a thing is "possibilistic" and is told by an aide that the researchers "refused to count your special words."

A Web site devoted to urban legends calls the purported study "a political jibe," pointing out that all Democratic presidents are given high or exceptionally high IQs while almost all Republican presidents are average or below.

[Well, we've all seen what a high-IQ Rhodes scholar can do. . .]

-- Anonymous, September 06, 2001