Talk:After Bush leaves Russia, Voice of Russia commentary questions President's intellect

This report is released to Wikinews under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License by Ted Lipien, President of FreeMediaOnline.org. Original reporting for this story was done by FreeMediaOnline.org Tedlipien 01:27, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Original?
It doesn't look to me like original reporting. It has sources etc. Neebs 01:50, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

The Voice of Russia commentary was discovered by me and I was was first to report on it for FreeMediaOnline.org. Tedlipien 01:58, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Reverting to develop
I've reverted this status to "developing" after MrMiscellanious noted the state of the article. I investigated it a bit further, and I agree that something seems to be one-sided towards the yup-Bush-is-an-idiot point of view. The article doesn't seem to fairly represent each side of the issue. However, this is just what I believe the article's state is, so if I'm wrong, feel free to put it back as "publish". —     05:43, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Ok, I focused the article on diplomasy and journalism. Think its publishable now. international 18:58, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

I've added information on reaction from LAT readers to the original column to show the controversial and partisan nature of the original comments. I also see the focus of this story as Russian foreign policy, international public diplomacy and journalism rather than President Bush's intellect per se. Tedlipien 19:07, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

I added some stuff in brackets right into the article. Somebody might want to polish it.

Anti-Putin, Anti-Russia
I tried to remove some of the Anti-Putin anti Russian nationalism bias that tagged along from freemediaonline. I'm not arguing he's a great guy, but I'd prefer facts about what he's done to negative generalizations about his behavior. SethDelisle 04:45, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Bush may be the smartest
I am taking out the qualifier to his educational acomplishments as it is not sourced and even if it was there is other evidence that he has a high intellect; his grades were higher than Kerry's at Yale plus George was quarterback of the Yale football team (which takes a lot of time) while still passing all his courses. History (George's major)is also one of the toughest subject matters and a Harvard MBA is not easy to get. If Bush has feigned low intellect to the masses and foreigners it would be very useful for writing off war criminal behavior and massive intelligence manipulation for foreign policy purposes as simply stupid mistakes made by a stupid person. Occam's razor methodology tells me that Bush is extremely intelligent; having excelled in academics at Ivy League graduate and post graduate studies as well as in business;made lots of money on the Texas Rangers' franchise; and politics; went from alcoholic party boy to fundamentalist President in about 9 years. I can assure you that the people he hangs around with personally see a much different intellect than the blue collar voters do when George hits the microphone. You and I might care whether average people think we are stupid; but I doubt whether Henry VIII, Hitler or Genghis Khan did..oh yeah, some people say Hitler was stupid too. To me it makes more sense to believe that George (and Karl Rove) know that the national US illiteracy rate has gone from 3% to 18% (since 1942) and that the american population as a whole has become dumber by the year (less than 50% graduate high school in Florida these days) so since he already has the Republican blue-bloods in his pocket,he only needs to appeal to the dumbies with his "axis of evil","wanted dead or alive" and "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" schticks to get and keep control.....and control is all he cares about; he knows enough about history to know that it,like news, is also controllable. That's my opinion and that's why I don't really like this story at all; however, it is a good news item,admittedly. Neutralizer 13:35, 23 July 2006 (UTC)