STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES ('intelligentsia' and 'intelligence' are mutually exclusive constructs)

"Ideas so stupid only an intellectual could believe them."

Mia, you are as always right on the ball. But since Kerry has a French backgound you should maybe use "soi disant intellectuelles" to punch up the tag.

Regards,

Kerry was a C student at Yale.

Harvard rejected his application and $$$ because they were concerned that his "less than honorable discharge" would prevent him from being able to take the bar exam.

Boston College had no problem taking his money and application to law school because they knew with his Catholic connections to the Kennedy family, Kerry would be a 'special' case.

The Catholic hierarchy responds to $$$ for annulments and special favors.

By the way, John Kerry does not have an annulment from Julia Thorne. That's another example of how John Kerry is a posing as a Catholic.

Liberal Intellectual...the quintessential oxymoron.

Wow--I thought that the teaser-quote, ''I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot'', was a corker until I burrowed into the article and found this:

''To show just how sincere he was, he made an outlandish offer,'' Newsweek's Thomas reports. ''If McCain said yes he would expand the role of vice president to include secretary of Defense and the overall control of foreign policy. McCain exclaimed, 'You're out of your mind. I don't even know if it's constitutional, and it certainly wouldn't sell.'''

ping

"To show just how sincere he was, he made an outlandish offer,'' Newsweek's Thomas reports. ''If McCain said yes he would expand the role of vice president to include secretary of Defense and the overall control of foreign policy. McCain exclaimed, 'You're out of your mind. I don't even know if it's constitutional, and it certainly wouldn't sell"

Unreal. UNFREAKING REAL. Of course its only AFTER THE ELECTION WE HEAR OF THIS. McCain clearly has ambitions and it looks like he made a deal w/ Bush. Prediction: McCain in 2008 as Rep nominee...

correction:Prediction: McCain in 2008 as Rep nominee... WANNBEE...

..........20/20.........counts too.

Kerry's Kennedy connection earned him a designation in his personnel file in the military.....PI....meaning politcal influence.

It goes a long long way with regard to evaluations, etc.

I would hope that the truth about the honorable/dishonorable discharge will be revealed.

You know, somebody's analyzed the president's military aptitude tests and yours and they concluded that President Bush has a higher IQ than you do, senator.

Bush looked awful SMART yesterday at his press conference. I never saw him so composed and rightfully forceful, wise, and kind.

BTW, earlier this morning I suggested that you be named 'Man Of The Year' by Time magazine. Good luck!

You and 'Buckhead' are in the running.

;-)

Bump

He rips into jokes about President Bush's intellect as "another liberal snig that annoys me a lot these days," adding, "The fact has to be faced: the intellectual candlepower of this administration is a great deal brighter than the Clinton administration . . . [and] the level of professionalism is very much higher."

hitchens on the clintons

"My two cents' worth--and I think it is the two cents' worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994--is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn't smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.... there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president"
J. Bradford DeLong
professor of economics at Berkeley
veteran of the Clinton administration
Mindless rhinestone-studded-and-tented kleptocracy: by Mia T, 01.13.00


ohn Podhoretz recently asked, "Whence comes hillary clinton's reputation for brilliance?" For the answer, he intuitively, rather brilliantly in fact, looked to her anatomy and noted,"This isn't the first time she's shot herself in the foot."

The above anatomical analysis supports the Podhoretz thesis. Notwithstanding The Pod's erroneous conclusions concerning hillary clinton's heart and nerve, he basically has it right. Anatomy is destiny...
Ian Hunter recently observed that our leaders are shrinking. "From a Churchill (or, for that matter, a Margaret Thatcher) to a Tony Blair [NB: a pre-9/11 Blair]; from Eisenhower to Clinton; from Diefenbaker to Joe Clark; from Trudeau to Chretien -- we seem destined to be governed by pygmies."
The pols understand their anatomical limitations well; they attempt to mitigate them with veneer. And so we suffer mindless alpha-beta-beelzebubba grotesquerie. . .
CAMOUFLAGE
KERRY'S PERFECT METAPHOR
POURQUOI JOHN KERRY EST DANGEREUX POUR L'AMÉRIQUE

(viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE)

and rhinestone-studded-and-tented kleptocracy.

With all the media genuflecting before the press-conference podium of bill clinton, it bears remarking yet again that the clinton intellect (an oxymoron even more jarring than AlGoreRhythm and meant to encompass the cognitive ability of both clintons) is remarkable only for its utter ordinariness, its lack of creative spark, its lack of analytic precision, its lack of depth.
The clintons' fundamental error: They are too arrogant and dim-witted to understand that the demagogic process in this fiberoptic age isn't about counting spun heads; it's about not discounting circumambient brains.
Politicos and reporters are not rocket scientists . . .
Professions tend to be self-selected, intellectually homogeneous subgroups of Homo sapiens. Great intellects (especially these days) do not generally gravitate towards careers in the media or politics. Mediocre, power-obsessed types with poor self-images do.
Thus, clinton mediocrity goes undetected primarily because of media mediocrity. ("Mediocrity" and "media" don't come from the same Latin root (medius) for no reason.) Insofar as the clintons are concerned, the media confuse form with substance, smoothness with coherence, data-spewing with ratiocination, pre-programmed recitation with real-time analysis, an idiosyncratic degeneracy with creativity.
Jimmy Breslin agrees. In Hillary Is the 'Me-First' Lady, Breslin laments:: "At the end of all these years and years that are being celebrated this week, the national press of America consists of people with dried minds and weak backbones and the pack of them can't utter a new phrase for the language or show the least bit of anger at a business or profession or trade or whatever this business is that is dying of mediocrity."

Listen carefully to the clintons. You will hear a shallow parody of the class president. Not only do they say nothing; they say nothing with superfluous ineloquence. Their speeches are sophomoric, shopworn, shallow, specious. Platitudinous pandering piled atop p.c. cliché.
In seven years, they have, collectively, uttered not one memorable word save, "It was a vast right-wing conspiracy," "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky,"and, "It all depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."
Even the clintons' attempts at alliteration fall flat. Compare Agnew's (Safire's) "nattering nabobs of negativism" with clinton's "preachers of pessimism," an impotent, one-dimensional, plagiaristic echo (its apt self-descriptiveness notwithstanding).
Before they destroy their backs along with their reputations, media gentry genuflecting at the altar of the clinton brain should consider Edith Efron's, Can the President Think?
A wasted brain is a terrible thing.

November 05, 2004, 8:26 a.m.
American Exceptionalism
The message of Tuesday's verdict.

Tuesday's election was the greatest turnout in American political history, the first majority vote for a president-elect since 1988, and the largest number of ballots cast for a president in our history. What are we to make of it all, besides the obvious fact that the citizens have spoken clearly and that their voices were recorded fairly and accurately?

Some of us have been saying for months that there was no way John Kerry was going to erase a stubborn 2-3 percent shortfall, for a variety of reasons. His unsolvable problems ranged from his Brahmin, aristocratic coldness and deductive pessimism, to his transparent and opportunistic flip-flopping, to the venomous "help" of the Michael Moore/Howard Dean/Al Franken extremist fringe, to the incongruity of billionaires voicing boutique leftism -- whether that be the often-polarizing Teresa Heinz Kerry or the creepy George Soros. The electorate also sensed that a Kerry victory would represent to the Europeans, the Arabs, and our enemies in the field a repudiation of the current struggle against the terrorists.

Two multimillionaire lawyers from the East Coast were not populists in the manner of a Richard Gephardt, and it was the epitome of arrogance to pretend that they were. Now is not the time for the Democrats to harp about "a divided county," but to ensure that next time Hollywood, MoveOn.org, rock stars, and billionaire currency speculators do not headline their campaign, though venom and money they may bring. Perhaps someone in the Democratic party will tally up a Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry and conclude that there is a pattern here that leads to political suicide. And perhaps the world will conclude that America, thank God, still stands firm against the utopian socialism of the U.N., Europe, and its own privileged sophisticates.

In addition, most of us did not think that all the shrill and increasingly desperate efforts of Michael Moore, the New York Times, Dan Rather, ABC News, Ted Kopel, and Bruce Springsteen would turn the tide. In fact, most of us suspected that they might very well boomerang and ensure victory for President Bush -- despite a supposedly "rocky" economy in key states, a war that was systematically reported, in biased fashion, as an American quagmire, and Kerry's smooth debating skills.

Even the election-evening hysteria -- exit polls supposedly presaging a massive Kerry turnaround; mythical talk of the radical youth vote, the new Hispanic muscle, etc.; the on-air commentary of mainstream, teary-eyed talking heads sexing up a Kerry upset while the polls were still open in the West -- could not pull it off. Despite all that and more, George Bush still out performed Bill Clinton by being reelected with a majority vote and increasing his partisan margins in both the House and Senate.

Despite losing the majority of state legislatures and governorships, the U.S. Congress, the presidency, and soon the Supreme Court, our anointed elite still doesn't quite get it. Middle America can be amused by, but still despise, Michael Moore. It can be uneasy with the pessimistic reporting from Iraq, but still be very much willing to finish the war and win at all costs. It may enjoy a trip to Europe, but does not wish to emulate the French, Germans, or Greeks.

The East and West Coasts and the big cities may reflect the sway of the universities, the media, Hollywood, and the arts, but the folks in between somehow ignore what the professors preach to their children, what they read in the major newspapers, and what they are told on TV. The Internet, right-wing radio, and cable news do not so much move Middle America as reflect its preexisting deep skepticism of our aristocracy and its engineered morality imposed from on high.

The Democrats now lament that America would prefer to be "wrong" with George Bush than "right" with them. They will no doubt adduce a number of other paradoxes, excuses, and sorrows. But the fact is that the Left was united, well-funded, and ran the most vitriolic campaign in the Democratic party's history -- and still lost, taking all branches of power with it. The New York Times and the major networks have undone their legacy of a half-century, and in the desire for cheap partisan advantage have ruined the reputations of anchor men, the very notion of fair front-page reporting, and, indeed, the useful concept itself of an exit poll. 60 Minutes, Nightline, ABC News -- these are now seen by millions as mere highbrow versions of Fahrenheit 9/11.

Much of the world -- in Europe, among the dictatorships and autocracies of the Middle East, and indeed among the terrorists themselves -- realized that the presidential election was a referendum on America's will in both Afghanistan and Iraq. So be it. Thus the president's victory is a strong message to the Arab League that democracy is coming to the Middle East as it did earlier to Germany, Japan, South Korea, Panama, Serbia, and Afghanistan, and a message to the terrorists that their beheadings, their sick infomercials, and their deified mass murderers will only earn a rendezvous with defeat if not annihilation. The farmers of Utah, the plant workers of Ohio, and the immigrants of Florida are not the same folk as those of Spain. America saw the election-eve face of bin Laden, heard his pathetic rant -- and shrugged that he, not it, was going down.

Finally, with the Kerry defeat we should lay to rest the Left's latest revisionism that was much in vogue during the last few months in the mainstream media -- promulgated by journalists and pundits in places like Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and the Atlantic. We were lectured ad nauseam that the terrorists did not -- as did extremists of all ages such as the Nazis, Japanese, and Soviet totalitarians -- hate us for our allegiance to consensual government, modernism, and the freedom of the individual, but rather had understandable grievances because of our support for Israel, the war in Iraq, or the presence of oil companies in the Middle East. That canard too was rejected by the voters.

Bin Laden's allegiance to fundamentalist fascism and hatred of the West may stay constant, but it is ignored by our intelligentsia, who instead gives credence to al Qaeda's various grumbles that have ranged from the U.N. embargo of Iraq to U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia to, most recently, the supposed toppling of high-rise buildings in Lebanon. That there is now no embargo of Iraq, but U.S. aid; that there are no troops in Saudi, but increasing U.S. criticism of the monarchy; that Americans were butchered in Beirut and did not really retaliate but instead saved Arafat from his doom -- all that apparently does not register with Bush's critics. In contrast, the majority of Americans insists with the president that the Islamic fascists have no more gripe against America than did a Tojo, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, or Khomeini -- and that such nightmarish figures, not our values and policies, must and will pass away.

The revisionists kept repeating in this campaign that Afghanistan was lost to the warlords due to "taking the eye off the ball in Iraq" and "outsourcing" the fighting and thus losing bin Laden. George Bush ignored these second-guessing experts, assured the American people that, like our forefathers who won WWII, a much richer America could still fight and win two conflicts at once, and that bin Laden, in the manner of a Karadzic or Mladic, was a doomed man -- his end a detail of when, not if.

The harpies shrieked that Saddam's petrofueled barbarity was not connected with al Qaeda or even the larger wave of Islamic terrorism -- as if, say, Aryan Nazis could not have had anti-democratic alliances of convenience with Asian imperialists in Japan; as if the first World Trade Center bombing, the North Africa killings, the career of Zarqawi, and the al Qaedists in Kurdistan were either nonexistent or irrelevant.

In response, George Bush maintained that Islamic fascism is global, fed by self-induced failures of Middle East autocrats, who hand-in-glove with terrorists diverted the frustration of the Arab Street against America -- a hyperpower that is not, pace bin Laden, libertine Sweden but rather their worst nightmare. Autocracy is their illness, and democracy, not American apologies, is their cure.

The administration maintained, without wavering, that those who were blowing up Americans in Kabul, or Baghdad, or Westerners in Madrid and Bali were of the same ilk. Their differences were the stuff of legalistic nit-pickers who might have equally parsed Mussolini's fascism from Hitler's Nazism or claimed that Mao's Marxism so differed from Stalin's Communism that the two could never have teamed up in Korea with yet a third wild-card totalitarian.

George Bush -- through the beheadings, the kidnappings, Abu Ghraib, the hysteria of a Richard Clark, Joe Wilson, Anonymous, Rathergate, the 9/11 Commission, CIA rogue analysts, cheap European slurs, insane remarks from Walter Cronkite to Bill Moyers, and last-minute media fabricated "scandals" -- has never faltered, so confident was he in the exceptionalism of America and the unshakeable resolve and competence of the U.S. military.

Most of the American people, of course, agreed all along.

-- Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

You always aMaze me, Mia! - BTT

bttt

bump

Finally, with the Kerry defeat we should lay to rest the Left's latest revisionism that was much in vogue during the last few months in the mainstream media -- promulgated by journalists and pundits in places like Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and the Atlantic. We were lectured ad nauseam that the terrorists did not -- as did extremists of all ages such as the Nazis, Japanese, and Soviet totalitarians -- hate us for our allegiance to consensual government, modernism, and the freedom of the individual, but rather had understandable grievances because of our support for Israel, the war in Iraq, or the presence of oil companies in the Middle East. That canard too was rejected by the voters.

Bin Laden's allegiance to fundamentalist fascism and hatred of the West may stay constant, but it is ignored by our intelligentsia, who instead gives credence to al Qaeda's various grumbles that have ranged from the U.N. embargo of Iraq to U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia to, most recently, the supposed toppling of high-rise buildings in Lebanon. That there is now no embargo of Iraq, but U.S. aid; that there are no troops in Saudi, but increasing U.S. criticism of the monarchy; that Americans were butchered in Beirut and did not really retaliate but instead saved Arafat from his doom -- all that apparently does not register with Bush's critics. In contrast, the majority of Americans insists with the president that the Islamic fascists have no more gripe against America than did a Tojo, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, or Khomeini -- and that such nightmarish figures, not our values and policies, must and will pass away.

The revisionists kept repeating in this campaign that Afghanistan was lost to the warlords due to "taking the eye off the ball in Iraq" and "outsourcing" the fighting and thus losing bin Laden. George Bush ignored these second-guessing experts, assured the American people that, like our forefathers who won WWII, a much richer America could still fight and win two conflicts at once, and that bin Laden, in the manner of a Karadzic or Mladic, was a doomed man -- his end a detail of when, not if.

The harpies shrieked that Saddam's petrofueled barbarity was not connected with al Qaeda or even the larger wave of Islamic terrorism -- as if, say, Aryan Nazis could not have had anti-democratic alliances of convenience with Asian imperialists in Japan; as if the first World Trade Center bombing, the North Africa killings, the career of Zarqawi, and the al Qaedists in Kurdistan were either nonexistent or irrelevant.

In response, George Bush maintained that Islamic fascism is global, fed by self-induced failures of Middle East autocrats, who hand-in-glove with terrorists diverted the frustration of the Arab Street against America -- a hyperpower that is not, pace bin Laden, libertine Sweden but rather their worst nightmare. Autocracy is their illness, and democracy, not American apologies, is their cure.

The administration maintained, without wavering, that those who were blowing up Americans in Kabul, or Baghdad, or Westerners in Madrid and Bali were of the same ilk. Their differences were the stuff of legalistic nit-pickers who might have equally parsed Mussolini's fascism from Hitler's Nazism or claimed that Mao's Marxism so differed from Stalin's Communism that the two could never have teamed up in Korea with yet a third wild-card totalitarian.

George Bush -- through the beheadings, the kidnappings, Abu Ghraib, the hysteria of a Richard Clark, Joe Wilson, Anonymous, Rathergate, the 9/11 Commission, CIA rogue analysts, cheap European slurs, insane remarks from Walter Cronkite to Bill Moyers, and last-minute media fabricated "scandals" -- has never faltered, so confident was he in the exceptionalism of America and the unshakeable resolve and competence of the U.S. military.

Most of the American people, of course, agreed all along.

Victor Davis Hanson
American Exceptionalism

Unfreaking real is exactly what I thought.

If one can get past the underhanded aspects of a kerry/ mccain ticket, can anyone imagine those two personalities in a room together for anything over 15 minutes w/o some kind of explosion? I can't. There isn't a room big enough to contain those two egos, IMO. It would have been like one of those rock band dissolutions only it would have erupted after the second campaign stop. And no way do I think that McCain would take the second slot on any ticket to start with.

BTW, a poster commented on another thread that reporters were given unfettered access to both campaigns but on the condition that they didn't report any of the inside stuff until after the election, so that might splain why we're only hearing about this stuff now.