Anyway, regardless of President Bush’s reading schedule, I have never considered him to be anything less than an intelligent, educated man. I simply pity the fact that his education and leadership style center on business management and dry policy papers rather than the classic statesman style of those educated in the humanities. That’s not an insult, simply a regret.

I believe it was Karl Rove (I might be wrong as to which advisor) who told about losing a contest to the President. In one year, President Bush read more than 100 books, while Karl finished at something like 95.

THAT suggests an intellectual curiousness that the left would like to deny

One thing that should be pointed out about this whole education thing…I am a math major. Neither dates nor politics are anywhere near anything taught in the majority of my classes (actually, occasional dates about when this-or-that was discovered, but hardly the main focus). And many of my firends are also sciences or engineering majors. In fact, it is a relatively small slice of majors where this stuff is relevant. As for me, I have taken only four classes where that stuff might come into play.

One was a writing class involcing politics where the “prof” was a grad student, and it was less about politics and more about dangling modifiers…the type of class that for 95% of kids is a waste of time, but they can’t have 5% of grads unable to make a complete sentence.

One was a history class, where the history was sufficiently long ago and not America-centric to be an everyday right-left argument. The big thing he went on about is that, as he put it, “our past was once their future” (or, that to view historical events as this inevitable obvious sequence of events moving inexorably towards one or another conclusion misses the context in which people in the past made whatever choices or whatever observations about their surroundings, in addition to often being wrong). And he was somewhat big on dates, I heard his tests were full of random obscure knowledge but we ended up having no tests only papers.

My last was a Political Science prof on Constitutional Law. He was evenhanded I thought, I was aware of the fact that he is Liberal, because he mentioned it a few times (like when relating a story about his daughter…after she went to elementary school he asked her about the moment of silence in the school, and she responded that it was to give the students time to calm down). He would rarely say good or bad things about cases either way, just relating the arguments from both sides. And in recitation, the class discussions were usually not too partisan, with people (including me) often taking the conservative side one case and the liberal side the next. And people were more worried about remembering the difference between scrict and minimal scrutiny and thinking through the logic of the various arguments/doctrines/etc. than about arguing their side’s talking points.

Among my friends, there is no difference in level of knowledge between McCain people and Obama people. I obviously have no way of proving this for my friends or the country at large so I will just go on the record say that yall are all wrong on this one and leave it at that.

There was something else I was going to say…but I don’t remember…so whatevs, I will leave it at that for now.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

I thought of that quote many times when we were giving up our fourth amendment rights by giving the telecom’s retroactive immunity. Oh wait, can I say that here?

If you don’t have 3 hours to watch the original Solaris, as I mentioned in another comment tonight, the above is pretty much the point of the original Stanislaw Lem novel.

Which reminds me, I keep forgetting to subscribe to Fortean Times.

I happen to disagree with the managerial society and with policy-wonks like Bush, Cheney, etc., but I still respect the fact that they have had the benefit of graduate education. Unfortunately, they neglected the humanities in favor of economics, sociology, political science, etc., but that doesn’t necessarily make them bad people.

On the other hand, you are right in that there are some mainstream conservatives who are beginning to adopt Luddite tendencies toward academia and the humanities in general. Rush, for all the times he has been right in the past, was dead wrong a few weaks ago when he took apart Niall Ferguson. Rush implied that Ferguson is some type of wacko Euro-commie who hates Americans. On the contrary, Ferguson is an old-guard British conservative who has a fellowship with the Hoover Institution. Those in the know understand that the Hoover Institution does not offer such positions to bozo lefties. Further, Ferguson has championed: the flat tax, privatization of social security, and slashing the federal deficit. These are not exactly lib positions.

All this to say that, yes, there is a small segment of mainstream conservatives (including Peggy Noonan, who should know better) that are beginning to demonstrate hositility to academia. It’s utterly wrong and sad, but I don’t think that it can be traced to President Bush.

–WFB, Jr.

The problem with being really smart is that one thinks one is smarter than everyone else, that IQ entitles leaderhip, and that credentialism equates to competence (e.g, M.Ed. and running a public school).

These aren’t the same as policy questions, these are more dumb political things, but same idea.

There’s no question that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan thought on their own, and that Reagan was a lot smarter and better read than the academic clique of the era wanted to admit. Newt Gingrich was/is an original thinker who pulled together other conservative thinkers to put together a conservative vision of government that won back the House in 1994.

Somewhere, it changed. George W Bush is the most anti-intellectual President we’ve had in my lifetime. As Peggy Noonan wrote about him (gushingly, meaning to praise him, justifying why she was leaving the Journal to work for him), “He’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world.”

Bushism has run out of steam, and we need some real thinking to be done to rebuild the party (and rebuild we will have to do - best case for 2009 is a strongly Democratic House, a strongly Democratic Senate, and a moderate who likes to work across ideological and party lines in the White House).

Paul Krugman, a slavering liberal if ever there was one, had a column a week or two back on the anti-intellectualism built into the current Republican brand. While I disagree with a lot of what Krugman thinks, it’s worth reading and thinking about. No one would have been able to say this kind of stuff about Republicans fifteen years ago, no matter how much they disagreed with us. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/opinion/08krugman.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

We need to get past that, and get back to thinking hard about hard issues - with willingness to tolerate painful truths and new approaches - if we are going to get this party back on the rails.

Of course, I may get banned for making this observation that we’ve got work to do.