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Beer Chang

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Even though I dislike the policies of George W Bush, I think it is wrong to call him stupid. Perhaps money and family influence opened doors to the prestigious schools he attended, but if he was an idiot as some claim, he surely would not have graduated.

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Do these sound like words of a man who would have graduated from a university if he were poor?

"Do you have blacks, too?" --to Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso, Washington, D.C., Nov. 8, 2001

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." --on "Good Morning America," Sept. 1, 2005, six days after repeated warnings from experts about the scope of damage expected from Hurricane Katrina

"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully." --Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 29, 2000

"Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." --LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." --Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

"People say, how can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil? You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in's house and say I love you." --Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002

"I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it...I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with answer, but it hadn't yet...I don't want to sound like I have made no mistakes. I'm confident I have. I just haven't -- you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one." --after being asked to name the biggest mistake he had made, Washington, D.C., April 3, 2004

"Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter." --in parting words to world leaders at his final G-8 Summit, punching the air and grinning widely as those present looked on in shock, Rusutsu, Japan, July 10, 2008

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." --State of the Union Address, Jan. 28, 2003, making a claim that administration officials knew at the time to be false

"So what?" –President Bush, responding to a an ABC News correspondent who pointed out that Al Qaeda wasn't a threat in Iraq until after the U.S. invaded, Dec. 14, 2008

"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories ... And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them." --Washington, D.C., May 30, 2003

"Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere!" --joking about his administration's failure to find WMDs in Iraq as he narrated a comic slideshow during the Radio & TV Correspondents' Association dinner, Washington, D.C., March 24, 2004

"Rarely is the questioned asked: Is our children learning?" --Florence, South Carolina, Jan. 11, 2000

"There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on --shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again." --Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

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Even though I dislike the policies of George W Bush, I think it is wrong to call him stupid. Perhaps money and family influence opened doors to the prestigious schools he attended, but if he was an idiot as some claim, he surely would not have graduated.

I disagree. He is the stupidest president of my lifetime. Just about anyone of average intelligence can graduate Yale. He's average and I don't want the POTUS to be just average.

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I disagree. He is the stupidest president of my lifetime. Just about anyone of average intelligence can graduate Yale. He's average and I don't want the POTUS to be just average.

à¹You are entitled to your view, and you might be correct. But all ex-US Presidents are entitled to the respect of the office.

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But all ex-US Presidents are entitled to the respect of the office.

I respect the office of the Presidency but that's no reason to respect people who've occupied it when they haven't done anything to earn that respect. That kind of blind adoration is for less-than-democratic dictatorships and kingdoms (and it only effectively works in those locales because of a serious lack of freedom of speech).

I personally respect Jimmy Carter. I have a modicum of respect for Bush, Sr. and, while I have a bit of respect for Clinton for a few things he did (especially economically) while in office and partly due to his charitable efforts after leaving office, I really don't respect him personally. As for GW Bush, sorry, the best I can muster up for him is a less than benign antipathy.

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à¹But all ex-US Presidents are entitled to the respect of the office.

I'm not really sure what that means.

I suppose that means that even though he is clearly sub-par in brain power compared to other ex-presidents and other world leaders that a good American will keep that to himself, and to a degree I can see that point.

But just cause someone wins an election it doesn't earn true respect although I suppose it's culturally correct to feign respect.

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I disagree. He is the stupidest president of my lifetime. Just about anyone of average intelligence can graduate Yale. He's average and I don't want the POTUS to be just average.

Perhaps someone of average intelligence can graduate from Yale with a bachelor dregree, but I think a MBA from Havard proves George W is no idiot.

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OK, I would like to buy a Havard MBA, how do I go about doing it?

I knew the admissions director at the Wharton so tried to get into their MBA program. I had totally goofed off at college so he really couldn't help me out though. If it was a close call I would have gotten in.

Turned out to be for the best as I took another path that didn't require hefty tuition that worked out well for me.

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Don't you understand that degrees can be bought?

Sounds like a conspiracy plot if ever I heard one. Entrance to an ivy league school may be influenced by family and wealth, but each teacher and professor would have to be paid off in order for an idiot to graduate with an MBA from Havard. Not very likely. Now do you want to tell us what have you been smoking?

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I'm not saying the Harvard MBA program is easy, but if you don't care about grades, someone of average intelligence can get by. The difficulty is getting the great grades that opens the doors to Wall Street and the premier consulting firms. This didn't matter to George Junior.

So W did what he does best, make friends and be in the right study groups.

Can a blithering idiot get a Harvard MBA? No, Not the type that needs tutors to stay in an undergraduate sports program.

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Entrance to an ivy league school may be influenced by family and wealth, but each teacher and professor would have to be paid off in order for an idiot to graduate with an MBA from Havard. Not very likely.

You over-estimate the integrity of some programs. There are some uppity colleges and programs that simply don't flunk out many students. Somewhat like the "honors" program you might have experienced in high school - once you're in, it's a different (and often easier) world and they simply don't flunk out the participants absent some really exaggerated behaviour (like never showing up for class or not taking the exams.

We also might be mistaking the ability to take a test for actual intelligence. Generally I'd agree that's true but I've also seen great test takers that wouldn't know enough to come in out of the rain.

If you look at the schools GW went to and the degrees he obtained, it'd be pretty hard to argue that he's uneducated or undereducated. But, if you look at his speech patterns and his logic at times, you might guess he flunked out of the 7th grade. Whether he always appeared to be this dumb (and almost illiterate at times), I don't know. Maybe he acted smarter when he was younger and drugs/alcohol did some damage later. Regardless, it was awfully hard not to cringe almost every time he spoke without a script during his presidency.

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I recall taking a high school chemistry exam when I had not studied at all. I was so nervous that none of the questions were making any sense to me. Finally, in desperation, I just randomly marked answers at the last minute. I was shocked when I got a "B" on the exam. I knew nothing about what was on the test.

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