From Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right:
If liberals truly believed verbal fluency were determinative of IQ, why did they call Reagan dumb? The peculiar liberal obsession with verbal facility as a proxy for IQ seemed to recede a bit when the “Great Communicator” was president. Instead of hailing Reagan as the greatest genius ever to inhabit the White House, his very facility with words was derided as the vocational faculty of a hackneyed actor.When he was over eighty years old, having left public life four years earlier, Reagan made an incredibly minor slip during his speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention. The refrain to his speech was a quote from John Adams: “Facts are stubborn things.” Reagan stated the refrain flawlessly a half-dozen times, but in one single rendition of it he said: “Facts are stupid things— stubborn things, I should say.”
That one-syllable slip quickly became the greatest Republican error since Watergate. Reagan’s monumental idiocy in making a minor slip has been cited in at least four books and flogged in seventy-seven news stories on LexisNexis. Soon liberals began embellishing on the word slip to claim Reagan had got the quote wrong— claiming it was not a verbal slip but a “misquotation.” This called for snippy remarks from all the Adams experts in the media.
A book review in the New York Times noted that “many famous and successful people had little regard for history, . . . cf. Ronald Reagan, ‘Facts are stupid things’ et passim” (meaning “and throughout”). An article in the Dallas Morning News said Reagan had “misquoted John Adams,” saying Reagan’s “version” was “Facts are stupid things.” A column in the Los Angeles Times suggested Reagan was “making up something stupid on his own.”
Bush occasionally misspeaks and therefore he’s an idiot. Reagan spoke mellifluously, which proved he was an idiot, except the one time he finally fumbled a word— which also demonstrated he was an idiot. You can’t win with these people; all a Republican can do is die.
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