“Newsweek reports that President Bush, appearing before a right-to-life rally in Tampa, Florida on June 17, stated: “We must always remember that all human beings begin life as a feces. A feces is a living being in the eyes of God, who has endowed that feces with all of the rights and God-given blessings of any other human being.”
“The audience listened in disbelief as the president repeated his error at least a dozen times, before realizing that he had used the word “feces” when he meant to say “fetus.”
My, what a buffoon. No, not the president, but the purveyor of this pernicious little tale. Certain that this was yet one more Internet-powered urban legend, the Monitor immediately checked in with www.Snopes.com, and once again that invaluable myth-busting website delivered:
“This item,” according to Snopes, “is nothing more than a fabrication which plays on President Bush’s reputation for making verbal miscues – no such report about his speaking at a right-to-life rally and repeatedly misusing the word “feces” in place of “fetus” appeared in Newsweek, or in any other news publication.
“Moreover, according to the president’s public schedule, on the date listed (June 17, 2004) he was not in Tampa, Florida, nor did he appear at a right-to-life rally. (The president made a quick trip to Tampa on 16 June, but he was there only to deliver a speech about the military at MacDill Air Force Base. By the next day he was back in Washington, D.C., then he was off to the state of Washington for events with no connection to the right-to-life movement.)”
So the boob in this case isn’t Bush, but my excitable correspondent. Poor guy was convinced that this alleged Newsweek account would finally open the Monitor’s eyes to what he and others like him trumpet as the president’s manifold intellectual shortcomings.
According to that report, “the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton, Pennsylvania detailed its findings of a four month study of the intelligence quotient of President George W. Bush….[whose] low ratings were due to his apparent difficulty to command the English language in public statements, his limited use of vocabulary (6,500 words for Bush versus an average of 11,000 words for other presidents), his lack of scholarly achievements other than a basic MBA, and an absence of any body of work which could be studied on an intellectual basis.”
The Lovenstein Institute was described as a “think tank” made up of “high caliber historians, psychiatrists, sociologists, scientists in human behavior, and psychologists. Among their ranks are Dr. Werner R. Lovenstein, world-renowned sociologist, and Professor Patricia F. Dilliams, a world-respected psychiatrist.”
For good measure, the report stated that the study “was commissioned on February 13, 2001 and released on July 9, 2001 to subscribing member universities and organizations within the education community.”
Sounds so realistic, doesn’t it? Well, maybe to those who think denigrating Bush’s intellect adds points to their own IQ’s. Let’s turn again to www.Snopes.com: “No, this isn’t a real news report, nor does it describe a real study. There isn’t a “Lovenstein Institute” in Scranton, Pennsylvania (or anywhere else in the U.S.A.), nor do any of the people quoted in the story exist, because this is just another spoof that was taken too seriously.
“The article quoted above began circulating on the Internet during the summer of 2001. In furtherance of the hoax, later that year pranksters thought to register www.lovenstein.org and erect a website around it in an attempt to fool people into thinking there really was such an institute.”
As President Bush would probably be the first to tell you, it takes a real dummy to believe everything one sees on the Internet or in an e-mail.