Dumb & Dumber

Dumb & Dumber, no, not the flick but rather the readability level of the bloviating by the presential candidates, with THE DONALD @ number 1 with a 4th grade Readability Score. In comparison, Washington's  "Farewell Address" was 17.9 and Kennedy's  inaugural 13.9. Since then, the downward spiral's been remarkable. Maybe it's the fast food we eat or the entertainment we watch. In any case, Dumb & Dumber rules. :)

Real estate mogul Donald Trump rose to the top of the Republican field just days after he announced his candidacy in a now-infamous speech at the Trump Tower. But perhaps the most extraordinary part of that address—besides being a seemingly stream-of-consciousness amalgamation of half-baked Reaganisms and Steve Doocy ramblings from the ​Fox and Friends​ couch​—​was its startling simplicity. It was more than just that his plan for dealing with Iran was to take their oil, though: According to ​the Boston Globe, the whole thing was delivered in language a fourth-grader could understand.

The ​Globe​ used an algorithm, known as the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, "​that crunches word choice and sentence structure and spits out grade-level rankings​." Developed by researchers in the 1940s and modified for the U.S. Navy in the 70s, the test measures the complexity of a speaker's diction and, theoretically, concludes the level of education an average person would need to have in order to understand it. 

Dumb & Dumber anyone?