Reuters is clueless. The block writing about going to the bathroom seems to have been written by someone else, probably Condi Rice. If that's Bush's hand writing in a smaller cursive script, then he's responding to her plea to get outta there. I suspect both were getting bored and wishing they were somewhere else. When it's not being corrupt or incompetent, the UN is a bore.

The remarks above about Bush's intelligence are both out of place and wrong. Comparisons of officer test scores taken by Bush (Air Force) and Kerry (Navy) suggest that Bush has about 10 IQ points on Kerry and has an IQ just shy of 130. That makes him smarter than about 98 out of 100 people and perhaps an even higher percentage of his sneering, NPR-listening critics.

My own sense is that people with IQs in the 120-130 range make the best leaders. Those with higher IQs display a quirky inability to understand people and often lack the ability to make sense of cultural or historical trends. President Carter is a good example. With an IQ that I believe is in the high 140s, he seems to think every problem can be solved if he only spends enough time reading policy papers.

His successor, Reagan, didn't bother with long, dull and often inaccurate policy papers. His extraordinary sense of the American public had been honed by years of traveling as a GE company repesentative to hundreds of factories and offices across the country. He also had certain basic beliefs about human nature, such as their desire to live free of repression and terror, that informed everything he did. For Carter "human rights" was a verbal abstraction that was useful politically. For Reagan it was a living thing.

One of Reagan's speech writers remarked that when he listened to speeches that he himself had written, he was amazed that Reagan, by a strategic pause or emphasis, could make a speech say more than its writer thought was there. Recall Reagan's "Gorbechev tear down this wall" speech and then imagine Carter stumbling through those same lines and you'll grasp the difference.

Reagan knew what the people in Eastern Europe were going through from personal experience. In the late 1940s, he led the fight against a Soviet-funded union's attempt to take over all movie production in Hollywood. The head of the union had made clear that people would be killed in the process and there were times when Reagan felt the threat was so serious, he stayed up all night with a pistol in his hand. (The pressure from that wrecked his first marriage.) There's nothing that gives depth to a message like experiencing the same hopes, dangers and fears as your audience. That's Reagan. For Carter, recall how he reacted when attacked by that "killer bunny."

Imagine Clinton, Kerry or a NPR host trying the make that same Brandenburg Gate speech. Clinton is best talking about :"hot babes." Kerry's talent is living well on a rich wife's fortune. NPR delights in criticizing those that they lack the ability to understand, people whose taxes pay their salaries. If you want to understand NPR, read the biography of Marie Antoinette on Wikipedia.

Why do I bring up Reagan when the topic is Bush? Because the same people that sneered at Reagan's intelligence now sneer at Bush's. Two decades ago they thought there was no need to transform the repressive Soviet state as long as we understood it and agreed to co-exist. (Last night I read Daniel Boorstin saying just that in 1989.) They were wrong about Reagan and Eastern Europe is now free, no thanks to them. It's easy to suspect that this "smarter than thou" crowd is also wrong about Bush and Iraq.

If some of them were to make a visit to the john and remain there, the world would be a far better place.