Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (564111)	5/1/2010 11:59:06 AM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 1576323

Hillary was right about Obama: youtube.com

To: bentway who wrote (564111)	5/1/2010 2:38:54 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576323

Wingers openly admit they prefer mediocrity...from the Obama thread: Barack Obama's A-grade preaching galls C-grade public P. J. O'Rourke From: The Australian May 01, 2010 12:00AM BARACK Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left. Nancy Pelosi needs a session on the ducking stool. But everyone with an ugly divorce has had a Nancy. She's vexatious and expensive to get rid of, but it's not like we give a damn about her. Harry Reid is going house-to-house selling nothing anybody wants. Slam the door on him and the neighbour's rottweiler will do the rest. And Barney Frank is self-punishing. Imagine being trapped inside Barney. The secret of the Obama annoyance is snotty lecturing. His tone of voice sends us back to the worst place in college. We sit once more packed into the vast, dreary confines of a freshman survey course - Rocks for Jocks, Nuts and Sluts, Darkness at Noon. At the lectern is a twerp of a grad student - the prototypical A student - insecure, overbearing, full of himself and contempt for his students. All we want is an easy three credits to fulfil a curriculum requirement in science, social science or fine arts. We've got a mimeographed copy of last year's final, with the multiple-choice answers already written on our wrists. The grad student could skip his classes, the way we intend to, but the s.o.b. is taking attendance. The US has now made the mistake of letting an A student run things. It was A students who took over the business world during the derivatives, credit swaps and collateralised debt obligations. We're still reeling from the effects. This is why good businessmen have always adhered to the maxim that A students work for B students. It was A students at the US Defence Department who planned the syllabus for the Iraq war, and to hell with what happened to the Iraqi Class of 03 after they graduated from Shock and Awe. The US tax code was written by A students. Every April 15 they have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail. Now there's healthcare reform - just the kind of thing that would earn an A on a term paper from that twerp of a grad student who teaches Econ 101. Why are A students so hateful? I'm sure up at Harvard, over at The New York Times, and inside the White House they think we just envy their smarts. Maybe we are resentful clods gawking with bitter incomprehension at the intellectual magnificence of our betters. If so, why are our betters spending so much time nervously insisting they're smarter than Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement? They are. You can look it up (if you have a fancy education the way our betters do and know what the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary is). Smart has its root in the Old English word for being a pain. The adjective has eight other definitions ranging from brisk to fashionable to neat. Only two definitions indicate cleverness - smart as in clever in talk and smart as in clever in looking after your own interests. Don't get smart with me. The other objection to A students is what it takes to become one - toad-eating. A students must do what teachers and textbooks want and do it the way teachers and texts want it done. Neatness counts! A students are very busy. Such brisk apple-polishing happens to be an all-too-good preparation for politics. This is because a student's success at education and a politician's success at politics are measured mostly by input rather than outcome. Yes, one got elected. Yes, the other became class valedictorian. But to what end? It can take decades to measure the outcome of an education. Did the A student at architecture college become a respected partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, or did he become Albert Speer? Likewise with politics. Did Woodrow Wilson's meddling in Europe wreak havoc on the globe? We wouldn't know for 20 years. Did Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal totally destroy the fabric of US society? We're not absolutely certain even now. Meanwhile Woodrow Wilson, FDR, the class valedictorian, and Albert Speer were inputting like crazy. The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews. The input-worshipping universe of The New York Times is like New York itself - thousands of restaurant reviews and no place you can afford to eat. Let us allow that some intelligence is involved in screwing up Wall Street, Washington and the world. A students and Type-A politicians do discover an occasional new element - Obscurantiumor - pass an occasional piece of landmark legislation (of which the healthcare reform bill is not one). Smart people have their uses, but our country doesn't belong to them. As the not-too-smart Woody Guthrie said, this land was made for you and me. The smart set stayed in fashionable Europe, where everything was nice and neat and people were clever about looking after their own interests and didn't need to come to America. The Mayflower was full of C students. Their idea was that, given freedom, responsibility, rule of law and some elbow room, the average, the middling, and the mediocre could create the richest and most powerful country ever. Thus in the US nobody loves a smart-ass. What's interesting about Obama is that he didn't start out being one. Lips (and academic records) are sealed at Occidental College and Columbia, but Obama doesn't seem to have been an A student as an undergraduate. He learned to make it or fake it at Harvard Law, where he graduated magna cum laude. Worse than an A student is somebody pretending to be one, witness Al Gore. However, perhaps I should hold my tongue and temper my ire. I have just received my junior high school daughter's report card. She's an A student. I questioned her, and it turns out so is every one of her girlfriends including the numbskull jock and the complete feather-brain who's besotted with Justin Bieber. I can't imagine what kind of input my daughter's school is measuring (although I assume my daughter delivers it via Twitter). But when input is valued enough, the US turns into that blissful land of social justice so desired by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barney Frank - outcomes are equal at last. I'm old-fashioned in my criticism of Barack Obama. He graduated from Harvard Law in the 1990s, barely yesterday. I'd forgotten the wonderful progressiveness of the US educational system. We're all A students now. theaustralian.com.au