Dyer the Dud: Anti-Americanism at its Worst

The opening lines of the Gwynne Dyer’s new book set the stage for his often simplistic and naive perspectives on global politics,

The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq. What is at stake now is the way we run the world for the next generation or more, and really bad things will happen if we get it wrong.?

I’m going to spare you any in-depth analysis of this article or Dyer’s fear-mongering thesis – it’s something you will have to research yourself to really appreciate (and disregard).

However, I can’t resist pointing out the recent journalistic faux pa committed by Dyer. In a recent article, Dyer goes to great length reporting the “tiresome cliché that George W. Bush isn’t intelligent. Citing research from the “Lovenstein study”, Dyer claims that both Bush senior and junior have sub-100 IQ’s.

The Lovenstein Institute, based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, has long published an IQ for each new president, based on his academic performance, writings “achieved without aid of staff,” linguistic clarity, and so on.

It’s rough and ready stuff, but it awarded Bill Clinton an astonishing IQ of 182 (the average in the U.S. today is around 104), which largely conforms to one’s previous impression that the man was useless but brilliant. . . .

At the other end are the Bushes. Even the father only scored 98, but he did seem in charge of his White House. He was, after all, a man with long service in bureaucratic wars and much foreign experience as well. But George W. Bush has no such background, and the Lovenstein Institute estimates his IQ at 91. . . . It is a harsh and an early verdict, but maybe things are spinning out of control just because they are smarter than he is.

Seems pretty convincing, wouldn’t you say? Well, the problem is, there was no actual “Lovenstein study”, because the Lovenstein Institute does not actually exist. The whole story was an “Internet hoax” confirmed by Snopes.com.

You see, Dyer and all those other anti-American/Bush-haters are often so blinded by their irrational hatred of the Americans, the Bush family and the conservative movement in the United States, that they simply gloss over the truth when it doesn’t fit their biased opinions. [via: Best of the Web]