The New York Times:

To Bush-bashers, it may be the most infuriating revelation yet from the military records of the two presidential candidates: the young George W. Bush probably had a higher I.Q. than did the young John Kerry.

That, at least, is the conclusion of Steve Sailer, a conservative columnist at the Web magazine Vdare.com and a veteran student of presidential I.Q.'s. During the last presidential campaign Mr. Sailer estimated from Mr. Bush's SAT score (1206) that his I.Q. was in the mid-120's, about 10 points lower than Al Gore's.

Mr. Kerry's SAT score is not known, but now Mr. Sailer has done a comparison of the intelligence tests in the candidates' military records. They are not formal I.Q. tests, but Mr. Sailer says they are similar enough to make reasonable extrapolations.

Mr. Bush's score on the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test at age 22 again suggests that his I.Q was the mid-120's, putting Mr. Bush in about the 95th percentile of the population, according to Mr. Sailer. Mr. Kerry's I.Q. was about 120, in the 91st percentile, according to Mr. Sailer's extrapolation of his score at age 22 on the Navy Officer Qualification Test.

Linda Gottfredson, an I.Q. expert at the University of Delaware, called it a creditable analysis said she was not surprised at the results or that so many people had assumed that Mr. Kerry was smarter. "People will often be misled into thinking someone is brighter if he says something complicated they can't understand," Professor Gottfredson said.

One of the smartest people I know was often fond of saying that if you couldn't explain something simply and clearly in a few short sentences, it was unlikely that you yourself understood what you were talking about. I think that's good advice that has proved itself well over the years.

The trick of saying something obscure and near-incomprehensible, a favorite tactic of leftist prophets like Derrida and Chomsky, serves three or four useful purposes simultaneously:

First, the creation of an "in" language gives the impression of higher intelligence. When a doctor says a man has "dypepsia", all he is saying is that the man has "bad digestion" -- in latin. There is no more intelligence required to use the jargon than the simple phrase. But to outsiders, the very obscurity of a new term seems daunting, and a signal that their border of their own knowlege has been reached.

Really this, in itself, signals no more intelligence than two teenagers conversing in their own cryptic slang.

Second, the use of obscure language protects against being found out. If you have a theory you think might be untrue, it's best to say it crypticly and ambiguously. Your opponents will have a hard time pining down your exact meaning. It leaves a lot of wiggle-room, and space for condescention when you're cornered -- you can retreat by saying you were misunderstood by the idiot cretins who can't correctly parse your unfathomable prose.

Third, it's always easier to say something in code than to decrypt it. It wouldn't take much mental effort for me to disguise my language to you by making substitutions -- I could use "ego" for "national interest" and "expression" as a term for "crime" and "ideogram" as a synonym for book or article. But it might take you quite a lot of work to determine what I was doing.

So there's an asymmetrical effort required: It takes little effort for me to hide meaning from you and, much effort for you to discover it. That makes you feel like you're doing a lot of work to scale the heights to meet me at my seemingly-lofty intellectual perch, not realizing I just rode the gondola.

Last, it allows those harbor deep fears of intellectual inferiority to play the "emporeur's new clothes" game, pretending they "get it" while ridiculing those who fail to see invisible threads. They assume there are clothes to be seen when, in fact, the joke is on them. This is more a social phenomenon: they are in the "in" crowd, therefore they must be smart.

Many "deep" and "hard-to-get" philosophies, to the extent they can be parsed at all, boil down to remarkably simple statements which are obviously wrong. Post-structuralism, for example, maintains the world is a socially-constructed text. Of course, that's obviously stupid and wrong. The same is true for Stove's "Worst Argument", which underpins much of this silliness.

The inverse is also true: If you speak clearly and simply, and especially if you avoid intellectual showboating, people will assume you're a dunce.

Plain-spoken quantum physicist Richard Feynman springs to mind.

As do two presidents: Clinton and Reagan.

Both were reasonably smart men. Yet one was widely believed to be a genius, and one, a moron. Why?

Clinton was a fairly smart guy -- though not nearly as smart as the rumors like to make him out as (180+). Credible estimates, based on his test scores, put him around 130, which is smart, but no Einstein.

Although Clinton spoke simply, he found other ways to let people know he had a brain. For example, I am told, he was quite good at quoting sizeable passages of scripture. Close associates were often impressed. This ability, "eidetic memory", while very useful, is not the same as intelligence. But people will often mistake it for such.

Reagan was also an excellent communicator and, unlike many of the talking heads of his time, actually understood economics. Yet in contrast, he was often ascribed an incredibly low IQ, and was compared to and suggested as the model for Chance, the mentally-retarded gardner in "Being There". Reagan was just an actor: all his lines were written for him by others.

This analysis was idiotic; the policies he implemented were clearly his own. If you have doubts, read through some of his earlier letters, and you'll see him clearly foreshadowing them. Reagan had a degree in economics, had read writers like Burke and Von Mises, and knew what he was doing economically. Further, after he stepped down, George HW Bush didn't follow the same policies. If they had been "fed" to Reagan through "handlers" like Bush, then why didn't Bush follow the same tact?

The answer is obvious: They really were Reagan's policies, thoughts, and plans.

However hard that may be for some critics to admit.

Second, and I don't mean to be so frank, but Clinton was considered a leftist, and leftists, even stupid ones, often get credit where it's hardly due. At least from the media. (And does it matter what others think?) Carter, for example, was often considered to be a genius. And Kerry doesn't contradict himself, he's just too "nuanced" or "subtle" for simpletons like me.

So Bush isn't the sharpest tool in the shed. He's only in the 95th percentile.

Compared to some people I know, that's not that smart. But he's a lot smarter than the average leftist calling him a moron.

I enjoy the irony in that.