I posted an item yesterday pointing out that religious and political conservatives, despite the stereotype, clearly don’t have a monopoly on ignorance, stupidity, and hostility to science.
But here, I think, is a good example of the stereotype, and, at least in passing, of a left-wing journalist pressing science into service in order to depict his targeted opponents as morons:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2015/apr/02/democracy-psychology-idiots-election
There are, of course, the obligatory cheap shots at Sarah Palin and George W. Bush.
At least, now that Ronald Reagan has been dead for quite a while, there were — unless I missed one — no references to him. (It’s hard not to think of Tip O’Neill’s famous description of Mr. Reagan as “an amiable dunce.”)
On the other hand, trying to keep up to date, the article takes an equally cheap shot at Senator Ted Cruz.
I’m really tired of this sort of thing.
Let me make it clear: I’m not a fan of Sarah Palin. Not even close. Nor have I endorsed Senator Cruz for president. I have reservations about him and prefer others thus far, though I’m open to persuasion. Nor was George W. Bush my conservative dream. Moreover, I freely grant that Mr. Bush was among the least articulate major politicians of my lifetime. I found his press conferences and debates excruciating.
But I also found it extremely irritating to watch smug journalists with no obvious claims to academic distinction complacently treating President Bush as America’s national dunce. He did, after all graduate from Yale University, which has a pretty decent reputation. Of course, he might have gained entry to Yale as a “legacy admission” because his father had attended that university and attained some prominence (though the senior Bush wasn’t yet Vice President, let alone President). But I seem to recall that Mr. Bush’s SAT scores and his grades were actually higher than those of either the suave and urbane John Kerry or the cosmic genius who deigns to walk among us as Al Gore. And then Mr. Bush went on to earn an MBA at Harvard Business School, which I’m told is hard to get into and rather competitive once you’re there, and where his father’s Yale connections would have carried little weight.
And what about Ted Cruz? Is he the “idiot” that Mr. Dean Burnett of The Guardian assumes — and assumes that his audience will assume — him to be?
Well, he was valedictorian at his Texas high school.
He graduated cum laude from Princeton University.
While at Princeton, he won the award for top speaker at both the 1992 U.S. National Debating Championship and the 1992 North American Debating Championship. That same year, he was named U.S. National Speaker of the Year and shared the “Team of the Year” honor with his debate partner, David Panton. Princeton’s debate team eventually named their annual novice championship after him.
He then graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review, executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review. One of his professors at Harvard Law was the famous liberal icon Alan Dershowitz, who’s said simply that “Cruz was off-the-charts brilliant.” Before being elected to the United States Senate, Mr. Cruz was the first Hispanic Solicitor General in the history of Texas, as well as the youngest and longest-serving person ever to hold that office.
Obviously, an “idiot.”
This abuse of science in an attempt to discredit an ideological target reminds me — yes, I’m that old — of the ad taken out by a group of liberal psychiatrists during the 1964 presidential election in which, on the strength of their putative expertise but without having ever actually examined or even met him, these men prostituted their scientific and medical authority by declaring Senator Barry Goldwater psychologically unfit for the presidency.
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