The legendary Jensen box

Tests of simple Reaction Time (RT) show a moderate negative correlation with IQ.  Negative because when it comes to reaction time, lower times (measured in milliseconds) imply higher IQ because they’re faster.  Simple reaction time is measured by having you put your finger on a home button while you wait for one of the lights on the Jensen box to flash.  The faster you can remove your finger from the home button, the faster your reaction time, and the faster you can press the button for the flashing light, the faster your movement time.

The correlation between IQ and reaction gets stronger still when it becomes choice reaction time.  Here for example, three lights might flash, and you must press the button of the light most distant from the other two.

On page 165 of Clocking the Mind Arthur Jensen writes:

In a truly random sample of 900 middle-aged adults (age around 56 years) in Scotland, the observed RT-IQ correlation for simple RT and 4-choice RT were -0.31 and -0.49 respectively.  This sample included the full range of IQs in the population, the distribution of both RT and IQ were close to normal (perfectly Gaussian for the middle 95% of the distribution), and the RT-IQ correlations did not differ significantly between subgroups defined by age, social class, education and error rates in the 4-choice RT

High IQ minds not only show faster reaction times, but more consistent ones too.  Indeed when you take a composite score of the speed and variability of RT across a wide range of elementary cognitive tasks, you get a 0.67 correlation with IQ.  However Jensen notes on page 229 of The g Factor that this correlation is based on college kids who have a restricted range of IQ and when you correct for this, the correlation becomes at least 0.77! And if composite RT measures correlate 0.77 with IQ, they might correlate as high as 0.9 with a hypothetically pure measure of g (general intelligence).

Critics might argue that even such a high correlation proves nothing, since it only reflects exposure to video games and other middle class amenities. It’s certainly true that RT, especially complex RT can be influenced by practice, however on page 244 of Jensen’s The g Factor, he notes that even when everyone has a chance to practice their RTs until practice effects plateau, the correlation with IQ only diminishes by 15%.  So instead of the g loading for composite RT measures being 0.9, it’s likely around 0.77 after everyone’s had a change to maximize performance, which is still higher than many psychometric IQ tests!

And if composite RT scores were carefully combined with other neurological variables like MRI in vivo brain size, the g loading could exceed 0.8.

In Clocking the Mind, Jensen dreamed of a World where you go to your doctor and along with measuring your height, weight, heart rate and blood pressure, you’re also given a routine RT test.  You would practice until performance plateaus and this would serve as your baseline against which a sudden decline in speed and consistency might signal dementia.  One advantage of chronometric testing is that unlike psychometric IQ tests, measures of RT can be repeated as many times as desired without invalidating the measure.

Another advantage of RT is it’s much harder to fake cognitive disability to escape criminal responsibility because fake slow RTs are so conspicuously slow, they are outside even the impaired range.

Of course as commenter Race Realist would say, correlation does not equal causation, so we don’t know whether RT is causing IQ, IQ is causing RT, or if some other variable is causing both.  But as commenter Mug of Pee implied, the litmus test for causation is “preceding in time” and omnipresent.  It’s hard to prove RT comes earlier in time than IQ does unless there are some infant RT tests, but there is evidence that the correlation occurs even within the same family, suggesting some degree of omnipresence.

The next step in proving causation is showing the RT-IQ correlation exists in every country.  One problem is the correlation was lacking in a sample of South African blacks however Jensen argues this was because the IQ test given had too little variance in that sample.

Ultimately evidence for RT causing IQ comes from the failure of any other way to explain the correlation.  Some have suggested the correlation is caused by health, practice or social class, but the correlation would likely hold even with these variables controlled.

Just when the media excitement over Oprah’s Golden Globe speech had finally died down, Oprah is back in the news .  This time for turning 64.  Oprah first became a pop culture icon when at the age of 32, when she became America’s #1 talk show host.

And today (Jan 29) she turned literally twice that age, and her star shows no sign of fading.

J.P. Rushton 1943-2012: RIP

According to science writer Peter Knudtson, on January 19, 1989, scholar J.P. Rushton stood in the Sausalito Room of the San Francisco Hilton hotel and unleashed his controversial evolutionary hierarchy of the three main races.

Knudtson writes, on page 163 of A Mirror to Nature:

In Rushton’s mind his hypothesis had global implications.  If his evolutionary-model-for racial-differences hierarchy turned out to be scientifically correct, he said, “then two important predictions can be made about the course of world history.”  First, so-called evolutionarily favoured Oriental populations–the top ranked race in Rushton’s neat hierarchy–could be expected to outdistance the predominantly Caucasian populations of North America and Western Europe.

Almost exactly 29 years later, Rushton’s prediction has come true this week as the Chinese have cloned primates; the biggest leap forward since man landed on the moon, perhaps a lot bigger.

Of course, other animals had been cloned in the past, but primates proved especially difficult because of epigenetics.  The Chinese have now solved the problem of primate cloning, and by extension, human cloning.  They have literally figured out how to bring people back to life after they die, or at least their genomes.

As the saying goes “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Commenter Race Realist informed me of Ken Richardson’s critique of Arthur Jensen’s genetic arguments.  The critiques are as follows:

It is very worrying to find a simplistic ‘Mendelian’ model of independent and additive genes still being urged upon us by Jensen. The ‘genetic beanbag’ view is clung to because it furnishes the only paradigm in which Jensen and coworkers can work ‘genetically’. In particular, it furnishes the famous ‘expected’ correlations for relatives (e.g. monozygotic versus dizygotic twins) which form the basis of ‘heritability’ estimates, even though doubts about the model for complex characters have frequently been expressed (see e.g. Barton& Turelli 1989). Indeed, recent molecular biology has shown better than ever how genes for evolved characters have become intricately tied in with adaptable regulatory systems across the genome as a whole. Under these regulations, variable alleles can be utilised for common ends, or common alleles utilised for divergent ends, as developmental needs dictate. Up to 90% of genes are regulatory in function, and not structural alleles at all (Jensen’s claim that humans have 100,000 polymorphic genes seems ridiculous). Phenomena such as canalization, divergent epigenesis, exon-shuffling (which modifies gene-products to suit current developmental needs), and even developmental modification of gene-structures themselves, now make a nonsense of the idea of a one-to-one relationship between incremental accumulations of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ genes, and increments in a phenotype (see e.g. Rollo 1995). This makes the objective of most twin and adoption studies surrounding IQ a red herring, because it is attempting to ‘prove’ a genetic model that no one can seriously believe in.

Ken is technically correct, but so what?  Nothing he said debunks the high  correlation between your DNA and your IQ.  So maybe the correlation is more about the parts of DNA that regulate the genes than about the genes themselves, but it’s all still predicted from your genome which is defined as your complete set of DNA, not genes only.  So to quote Hillary Clinton:

As for whether DNA’s effect on complex traits is additive or not, the empirical evidence suggests that it largely is.   As for whether DNA has an independent effect (causation) on complex traits,  commenter Mug of Pee says we need to ask whether the same genetic predictors of phenotype hold across a wide range of environments around the World, and when it comes to a genomic predictor of height,  it certainly does (though the predictor gets weaker on different continents)

Ken then states:

Jensen argues that g has evolved as a ‘fitness’ character. Yet it is the logic of natural selection that fitness characters come to display little if any genetic variation. This has been repeatedly confirmed in artificial selection experiments, and in the wild. The self-defeating logic of Jensen’s argument is obvious. Indeed, I find it amazing that, at the end of the twentieth century, complex, sophisticated edifices like this are being constructed on such patently erroneous foundations.

So by that logic, brain size and height should have little if any genetic variation since they too were fitness characteristics and yet the heritability for height is reportedly 0.7 and the heritability for brain size is reportedly similar.  Now perhaps Ken would dismiss all heritability studies as invalid, but then on what basis can he cite the “genetic variation” found in “artificial selection experiments”?

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Tests of general knowledge had long been used by psychiatrists as quick measures of intelligence but psychologists eschewed them because they were thought to measure education, not “innate ability”.  This changed after the Army IQ tests in World War I included one in their battery and found general knowledge to have an exceptionally high correlation with full-scale IQ, and when David Wechsler added general knowledge to his test battery, he found the same thing.

“Who’s Oprah?” is an example of a general knowledge question.   Indeed in the 1970s there was a billboard in Baltimore asking “What’s an Oprah?” as part of a campaign to get people to watch her co-anchor the local news, one of the rare fails of her career.  Oprah hated the billboard saying “people were expecting the second coming, and all they got was me.”

Oprah was much happier when she got demoted to co-hosting a local low budget morning show because here she could be spontaneous, show emotion and say whatever popped into her head.

Had David Wechsler lived long enough to see the rise of Oprah in 1986, he might have thought “Who’s Oprah?” would make a good question for his general knowledge (Information) subtest, because Wechsler believed that good items for this subtest are those the average American, with average opportunity, has a chance to acquire for himself, so for example, the distance between two important cities was considered by Wechsler to be a much better question than the distance from the Earth to the sun.

The average American adult has had so much opportunity to learn who Oprah is.  They could flip on her TV show.  They could hear about her on the news.  They could see her on the cover of the tabloids or her own magazine when they go to the grocery store.  Indeed with so much opportunity to see and hear about Oprah,  any native born American adult who doesn’t know who she is might have a problem learning, and absorbing and retrieving information.

Indeed according to a new CNN poll, only 2% of U.S. adults have never heard of Oprah, so not knowing who Oprah is, puts you in the bottom 2% of general knowledge (a measure of IQ) and the bottom 2% is defined by IQ tests as an IQ below 70 (U.S. norms).  In some U.S. states people with IQs below 70 can not be executed, because they’re considered too impaired to be culpable.

By contrast back in July 2015, a whopping 41% of Americans had never heard of Bernie Sanders.  Not knowing who Bernie Sanders is in July 2015 implied an IQ below 97; slightly below the national average but still very normal.

Of course in reality, one’s score on general knowledge is never based on a single question, and IQ is seldom calculated from a single subtest.

One might argue that “Who’s Oprah?” is a poor measure of IQ because intellectual types have better things to do than watch daytime TV.  Indeed Jonathan Franzen once claimed that he had never seen her show!

However this argument is debunked by what Arthur Jensen called the spread of g (general intelligence) effect, where high IQ people are more knowledgeable even about non-intellectual topics.  For example Jensen interviewed a hard-core baseball enthusiast with an IQ in the 70s (probably lower since in those days tests with old inflated norms were still used) but was shocked by how little he actually knew about baseball, despite his lifelong obsession with it.

By contrast a learned professor who believed only idiots watch sports was ashamed by how much he knew about baseball.  Jensen believed this was because high IQ brains are like a sponge that just naturally absorbs everything in their environment, even things they’re not actively attending to.

I once had a discussion with a member of the Mega society who was very disappointed to learn that general knowledge had such a high correlation with IQ, perhaps because he felt this correlation undermined the tests somehow.

The fact that knowledge tests are so heritable (supposedly) is surprising to those who expect “culture reduced” tests to better reflect the biological basis of intelligence than tests that are highly mediated by culture.  This is known as the heritability paradox.  Indeed the “fact” that knowledge tests are among the most heritable thas caused some to believe that the high heritability of IQ is not about tests directly measuring biological functions, but rather about those being genetically predisposed to learn seeking out environments where they can do so.

However according to Jensen, the heritability paradox is not a paradox at all, but rather easily explained by the well known concept of aggregation.  To correctly answer “Who’s Oprah?” you must for example, understand a talk show host while she’s on TV talking about adultery.  You must remember this understanding.  The next day you might hear someone say “I saw Oprah on TV talking about infidelity”.  You must know that infidelity is related to adultery, and this must cause you to remember you too saw a talk show host talking about that very topic, and thus infer her name is Oprah, and then you must store that knowledge in long-term memory and retrieve it when asked “Who’s Oprah?”.

So what looks like a single cognitive task (knowing who Oprah is) is actually multiple complex cognitive tasks packed together, so with each general knowledge question, you’re measuring a long sequence of brain functions in the time it takes to measure one, making them incredibly efficient measures of intelligence, at least for people who share the culture of the test.

An argument within this argument is whether tests of acquired knowledge really are more heritable than culture reduced tests.  Most heritability studies are based on comparing the phenotype correlation of MZ twins raised together with DZ twins raised together, but this method assumes both pairs are equally similar in environment .  A better method is using MZ twins raised apart and in the most famous of these studies, the culture reduced subtests (performance IQ) of the Wechsler scales were actually more heritable than the culturally loaded ones (verbal IQ).

As I’ve said before, scientists commonly assert that evolution is not progressive and that organisms occupying lower branches on the evolutionary tree are not anymore primitive or ancestral than organism’s occupying higher branches, because all extant life are, as journalist Peter Knudtson stated, “equivalent cases of time-tested evolutionary success”.

For example, Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote “evolution forms a conspicuously branching bush, not a unilinear progressive sequence…earth worms and crabs are not our ancestors; they are not even ‘lower’ or less complicated than humans in any meaningful sense.”

This web page even displays a helpful diagram of an evolutionary tree to debunk the idea of evolutionary rank:

The purpose of this post is not to convince you that evolution is progressive but rather to make a more basic point: A on the above tree should better resemble the common ancestor of A, B, C, and D, then B which should better resemble it than C or D.  Many scientists disagree arguing that all four have been evolving for the same amount of time, thus all four are equally distant from the common ancestor.  “Pumpkin doesn’t understand that A, B, C and D are all cousins, so one can not be ancestral to the other,” is what they’d think.

Yes they’re all cousins and not ancestors vs descendants, but precisely because C and D are cousins, you don’t know whether the common ancestor of them both better resembled C or D, and thus your best guess of what it was like is a hybrid: 50% C and 50% D.

Now what was the common ancestor of B, C and D like?  Well, we already guessed that the common ancestor of C and D would be 50% C and 50% D, and so the common ancestor that this common ancestor shares with B would be a hybrid of itself and B, and thus appear 50% B, and 25% C and 25% D.  Now you might say the common ancestor of B, C and D could resemble a perfect three way split between all three which is possible, but since C and D provide competing information on what their common ancestor was like, but B has a monopoly on what its ancestor was like, our best guess for what the common ancestor of all three will be skewed towards B.

Applying the same logic to the common ancestor of A, B, C and D, our best guess for what the common ancestor of all four was like, is 50% A, 25% B, 12.5% C, and 12.5% D.  That doesn’t mean that really is what the common ancestor of A, B, C and D, was like, but if all we had to go by was the evolutionary tree itself, that’d be our best guess.

So as you can see, the earlier your ancestors branched off the evolutionary tree (and stopped branching), the more similar they’re likely to be to the tree’s root.

Now we don’t have to use provocative language like A is likely “less evolved” and “more primitive” than B which “less evolved” than C and D, we can merely state that A is likely “most like the common ancestor”; “most basal” and “least derived”.

Why do so many brilliant minds deny even this?  I think it’s because it’s what the man on the street thinks, but he thinks it based on gut feeling, so those with better understanding enjoy explaining that “no humans didn’t evolve from apes, apes and humans are cousins.”  They never bother to ask whether the layman might be right, despite his lack of understanding.  It’s also part of the broader postmodern relativism that is learned in university and serves as a form of status signaling.

Even though I believe intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, I’ve long been a UFO skeptic because:

a) we’ve found no evidence of even microbial life on other planets, let alone complex life.

b) Earth is the most life friendly planet we know of, and even here life seems to have occurred only once in 4.5 billion years.

c) If aliens had visited us, it seems unlikely to me that governments would have been able to conceal it anymore than the chiefs of Native American tribes could have concealed the arrival of Europeans from their people.  Why would the aliens take the trouble to come all this way only for their arrival to be kept a secret?

But now the number of reputable people publicly taking UFOs seriously has reached a critical mass, including prestigious members of the U.S. military and reporters for The New York Times: 

People have been reporting UFOs for thousands of years, but the legend really took off after an alien space craft allegedly crash landed in Roswell,  New Mexico in 1947, only to be covered up by the U.S. government.

A popular theory among UFO enthusiasts is that when the United States nuclear bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, it created such an explosion that the aliens took notice and they’ve been keeping an eye on us ever since, kind of like how the U.S. and Israel are worried about the nuclear ambitions of countries like North Korea and Iran.  If so, it’s interesting that recent credible UFO sightings have occurred around the time that Trump and Kim Jong-il have been sparring over who has a bigger nuclear button.

If UFOs really are aliens, in a weird way it kind of validates J.P. Rushton for the following reasons:

a) Intelligent humanoid life on other planets fits nicely with his view that evolution is progressive since it “progressed” in the same direction on other Worlds.

b) It would explain the anomaly in Rushton’s theory of whites being more technologically advanced than East Asians, despite being less evolutionarily advanced, since UFO enthusiasts believe the U.S. stole its most advanced technologies from the crashed aliens.

c) The fact that these highly evolved aliens are believed to look a bit East Asian is consistent with Rushton’s theory that East Asians are the most evolved in human race.

Yesterday The New York Times reported:

Dr. Jackson said that despite expressions of concern, a cognitive test was not indicated for Mr. Trump and he had not planned to conduct one at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where the president underwent his annual physical on Friday.

“This has been the narrative for a while. He saw doing the physical as an opportunity to put some of that to rest,” Dr. Jackson said during a nearly hourlong question-and-answer session in the White House briefing room. “He actively asked me to include that in it, so we did.”

Dr. Jackson said that Mr. Trump received a score of 30 out of 30 on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a well-known test regularly used at Walter Reed and other hospitals.

The test is described as a “rapid-screening instrument for mild cognitive dysfunction” that focuses on “attention and concentration, executive functions, memory, language” and other mental skills. It asks patients to repeat a list of spoken words, identify pictures of animals like a lion or a camel, draw a cube or draw a clock face set to a particular time.

Dr. Jackson said the president did “exceedingly well” on the screening test, adding evidence to the doctor’s own assessment that the president has been “very sharp” during numerous interactions he has had with him during the past year.

Psychiatric experts said the brief, 10- to 15-minute screening test is not comprehensive and might not catch all patients with early stages of dementia. Dr. Bandy Lee, the author of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” which expresses concern about the president’s mental health, said in a brief interview that the president requires a full, detailed neuropsychiatric evaluation.

However, Dr. Jackson said he had observed Mr. Trump closely, often several times a day, for the past year, and was satisfied that the Montreal test is “sensitive enough” to have picked up serious cognitive issues if they were present.

In order to convert Trump’s perfect score of 30/30 to IQ,  I found a study that tried to norm the Montreal Cognitive Assessment.   The norms showed that Trump scored 1.82 standard deviations (SD) above the mean for his 70+ age group, implying an IQ of 127+ since each standard deviation above the mean on the IQ scale equals 15 points above 100.

However as the table below shows, the sample was overwhelmingly non-white , and IQ has traditionally been normed with reference to the white population.  Unfortunately the samples were too small to provide norms specifically for whites in Trump’s age group but from the table below we can calculate that being +1.82 SD with respect to total norms equals +1.74 with respect to white norms.  Assuming the same holds in Trump’s age group and assuming he legitimately scored perfect on this test (no monkey business),  it implies an IQ of  126+ (white norms).

In the past I’ve estimated Trump’s IQ to be as high as 125, but it looks like he’s at least that smart, and possibly much smarter, since the Montreal Cognitive Assessment doesn’t measure beyond 126+ in Trump’s cohort, and it’s tempting to add a 5 point bonus because many of the dullest folks in Trump’s birth cohort are excluded from these norms because of death, poor health and impairment.  If all had survived and been tested the average score would have been lower, thus making Trump perhaps 5 points smarter.  On the other hand, the standard deviation of the raw scores might be deflated by the mean being so close to the ceiling, thus inflating Trump’s IQ 5 points.  These two biases likely cancel each other out.

I blogged about all this way back in December 2014, but in light of all the Oprah for President talk, it’s worth repeating what I said back then.

It’s hard to think of a more disastrous decision for America than the 2003 U.S.-led invasion to remove Saddam Hussein, which cost America an incalculable amount of blood, treasure, security, and political capital, and continues to wreak havoc today, so those who had the intellect, courage, and integrity to oppose the war before it began deserve a large amount of credit, particularly if they did so publicly; and it’s hard to think of anyone who did so more publicly than Oprah, who did so repeatedly.

Of course Oprah was not publicly opposed to the Iraq war from the start.  After being bombarded with hate mail for doing a 2001 show asking whether war with Afghanistan was the only answer, she was not eager to appear anti-war when it came to Iraq too.  Indeed in October 2002 she did an Iraq show that was largely pro-war, and where Oprah was dismissive of an anti-war audience member.

Professor Daphne Read explained that in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center, The Oprah Winfrey Show, like all mainstream media, “was very closely tied to the Bush administration’s response and the media rhetoric of America Under Attack,…however, the content of Winfrey’s forum began to diverge from the purely consensual, giving voice to a much wider range of views”

By November 2002, Oprah had jumped off the media’s pro-war bandwagon.  In his book Dude where’s my country? anti-war advocate Michael Moore praised her for being the only mainstream media at the time to show footage of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein’s hand in the 1980s.

However the most significant anti-war show Oprah would do was a two-day special that aired the day after Colin Powell’s pivotal February 2003 U.N. speech making the case for war, which was credited with shifting public opinion in favor of regime change.  Winfrey recruited reporters from CNN to gather clips from people from countries as diverse as Britain, France, South Africa, Iraq, and Pakistan all trying to persuade America not to go to war, along with anti-war luminaries like Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul II.  Here’s some brief clips from that show.

Buzzflash.com claimed there was a deliberate attempt to stop the show from airing in some markets:

Bush pre-empted Oprah for no reason other than to stop her broadcast regarding Iraq and insert his own propaganda!…In the middle of the show a “Special News Report” notice came up, then Peter Jennings announced Bush would be making a MAJOR announcement on Iraq. Then Bush and Powell came in and Bush summarized what Powell had said yesterday at the UN. He spent about 20 minutes in all…The Administration would have known the content and timing of today’s show because it is broadcast live and/or in the morning in many markets such as Oprah’s home base in Chicago. This was in such bad form I couldn’t believe it! I called Harpo Studios in Chicago to let them know and they said they had received a lot of phone calls. I said Oprah should tell her audience what happened and that I thought Bush was purposely interfering with her show. They commented they didn’t know what the reason was and in any case there was no way to prove anything

Academics for Justice made the same assertion:

Today, Oprah Winfrey started a two-part series focusing on the impending U.S. war on Iraq. About halfway through the show the broadcast was pre-empted by coverage of Pres. George Bush, with Colin Powell at his side, reading a prepared statement on Iraq. The coincidental timing of this pre-emptive press statement raised immediate questions about the motives of the White House war strategists. Students of the Civil Rights Movement will recall an incident in 1964 when activist Fannie Lou Hamer sat before a live television audience and gave a riveting account of the oppression she and other Blacks faced in the South. President Lyndon Johnson was so convinced of the power of her appeal to undermine his own political/racial agenda, that he hastily called a press conference to pull cameras away from Hamer’s impassioned revelations…The pre-emption of Winfrey’s show today should be seen in the same light. Oprah’s audience is a vast and powerful—but largely apolitical—force of middle-class white women. It is likely that most did not watch Colin Powell’s live testimony at the U.N. yesterday. In fact, it is likely that this huge audience was being oriented to the issues of the Iraq war for the first time…The first 30 minutes of the show was decidedly anti-war and highlighted not only worldwide unanimity in opposition to the war but presented many of the heretofore unheard voices of ordinary people speaking forcefully against Bush’s motives

Undeterred by the alleged attempt to stop part of her February 2003 anti-war shows from airing, Oprah made one last ditch attempt to stop the war in March 2003. Just 48 hours before the war the began, Oprah aired an anti-war show that included Michael Moore and the following shocking video:

Shortly after the show aired, Harvard Law grad Ben Shapiro condemned the show, calling Oprah a dangerously powerful political force, shaping the views of millions with her ignorant views and wacky reasoning.  In fairness, Shapiro was really young at the time.  However Canada’s most respected media critic, John Doyle of the Globe and Mail, praised the show as “an act of extraordinary intelligence from Oprah.”

Doyle wrote:

At a time when the consensus in American television is that everybody should pull together and support the men and women in the U.S. military, what Oprah Winfrey did was outright subversion. In the last week, Clear Channel, Worldwide Inc., America’s largest radio conglomerate (and a company looking for a break from the U.S. government), has been organizing pro-Bush and pro-war rallies and then reporting on them. A Nashville TV station has been charging local advertisers to take part in an on-air, support the military campaign and gloating about the profits. That’s just the tip of it…In normal circumstances, the perspectives [Oprah] presented would not be notable, but in the contemporary context, they were amazing.

The decision to invade or not invade Iraq was arguably the most important test of the courage, integrity, and intelligence, that America’s leadership has faced in the last half century, and the fact that Oprah passed this test speaks very well of her qualifications to be President.