Victor Davis Hanson Ping !
Nicholson Baker is only a "prize-winning author" because he regurgitates leftist themes on command. New York literary circles have become frighteningly similar to Ellsworth Toohey's band of malcontent and talentless pseudo-artistes in The Fountainhead.
Note to those reading the NYT: "Intellectuals" only exist if you let them.
It is really not a sign of intelligence to distort the news and drive away an audience.
Amen!
The left can't ridicule the President for that one; Jimmah Cahtah says it the same way and he served in the nuclear navy!!
Excellent. Thanks for this!
Great article!
I believe truth-in-advertising would point out that Gore FLUNKED out of grad school. (But then it was divinity school...something he obviously does not hold in high enough esteem to bother studying.)
Not to mention the textbook racket that rips students off. This would be another liberal-tongue-clucker if the institutions were monopolized by conservtives rather than liberals.
Excellent insights...and ability to convey them, which, as the author states, is not as high a priority for many of our professors as having the correct view of the world.
If conservative thought can survive the mayhem of the next 8 years, the time of the self-righteous visceral Baby Boomer subversive will have passed into history. Then less noisy but better prepared among our young people who are actually finding ways, despite their professors, to learn critical thinking and effective communication will have distinct advantage of over the ill-equipped masses who take greater pride in their tatoos than their knowledge.
Oh for crying out loud. The press made a huge fuss in 2000 about how Gore scored higher on the SAT than Bush. But the fact remained that Bush scored a full standard deviation above the mean. And the mean on the SAT is not the average for the population as a whole but of a select group--the college bound. What this means is that Bush's intelligence is actually high when considered in the context of the full population. As if this is news to any of us.
The problem with Crystal and his ilk is that they are confusing articulation with intelligence. They are also forgetting that outside of Hollyweird, people want their president to have leadership ability and integrity.
The SAT doesn't claim to measure these qualities. But polls ask people's perceptions about who has them. Bush is the hands-down winner.
Artists and "intellectuals", the most useless among us.