Who is smartest, Bush or Kerry? Someone did some estimating based on military tests that the two men took in their 20s. The result:

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.

A little background. The college tests like the ACT and the SAT are closely related to intelligence tests. The idea was to weed out the people who would do well in college. These military test are presumably from the same family.

In a standard intelligence test, anything over 120 is considered genius. Because so few people score so high, individual questions can have a disproportionate effect on the final score. MENSA has a special test calibrated for the over-120 crowd.

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.

Many Americans still believe a report that began circulating on the Internet three years ago, and was quoted in "Doonesbury," that Mr. Bush's I.Q. was 91, the lowest of any modern American president. But that report from the non-existent Lovenstein Institute turned out to be a hoax.

A follow-up to the Doonesbury cartoon ran which revealed that it was a myth but implied that Bush wasn't as smart as 91. It ran September 11, 2001. The followup strips were pulled.

October Surprise? Not all that big but it is another hit for Kerry's reputation as someone who exagerates often (nuances the truth?).

Last year Kerry said this:

"This president hasn't listened. I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them, to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable,"

It turns out that he talked with some of them, possibly as few as one. Not all members have been contacted but 4 out of 5 contacted (there are 15 members total) said that they had never met with Kerry.

An official at the U.S. mission to the United Nations remarked: "We were as surprised as anyone when Kerry started talking about a meeting with the Security Council."

Wild Goose Hunt. The goose hunt probably didn't do Kerry any good. Every account I saw started with "in an effort to show that he is a real guy..." Real guys don't need to go out and show it.

Also, you may have noticed, Kerry said that they all got geese but he was not carrying one and the other three men with him only carried one each. Either Kerry left his goose on the ground or he "nuanced" the truth.