Ed,
You have way too much admiration for the big ivies, that's one thing I can say. Debating star at Yale? They have them every year, lemme tell you, and everyone who graduates from the ivies who was on the debate team will tell you what a star he/she was. What exactly makes someone a "debating star" anyway; the ones I knew in college seemed to be required to be nerds, first and foremost. Oh well.
I'll just let your other encomiums for Vietnam's Audie Murphy go unchallenged, as I wish to give you the last word (as many as you like) on the subject. I still can't figure out why JK didn't get the medal of honor, though . . .
As for academic success, hmmmm, I wonder how good John's grades at Yale were since I've never seen any cum laudes or magna cums (much less summa cums) associated with his degree. JK is not shy about tooting his own horn, so, shall we assume that he was about a grade inflated B+ student? And, coming out of Yale, even if he wanted to stay in the Northeast area, ya gotta figure he didn't make it into Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia, NYU, Cornell, Georgetown, or even Boston University. Ended up at Boston College for law school. Such a brilliant fella and Yale didn't want him? Well, maybe there was another reason, who knows (I bet you do, Ed).
But I know, in the hagiography that accompanies all Democratic candidates, they are all brilliant students (the Kennedys were notoriously poor students at Harvard, none made it into the Law School there, no matter how much $$ the family had, Teddy was thrown out ("rusticated") for a year for cheating while an undergrad), and every single Republican who has held high office has been characterized as stupid or, in the rare case (which, see, Nixon), smart but devious. It's just part of the scenery.
(The truth is, one of the most intelligent presidents we had, on pure academic achievement, was Gerald Ford: football star at Michigan AND Yale Law school, but he was constantly lampooned as "dim" by the press, as was Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush I and of course Bush II.)
Kb |
