Monday, April 11, 2005

Death Is the Answer

Here's another example, courtesy of the Drudge Report, of the high moral tone of political discourse offered by American liberalism. These people truly are deranged.

Getting Your Money's Worth?

Here's an article that may be of interest to those of you paying a king's ransom for you or your child's college education and wondering whether you're getting your money's worth (Registration may be required).

It might be pertinent here to repeat something we mentioned some weeks ago. If you can stomach some pretty vile and vulgar stuff, Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons is a must read for any parent about to send a child off to college in the near future or for any parent who has a child in college now. Wolfe no doubt exaggerates the dysfunctionalities of the contemporary university climate, but not much.

The story is about an exceptionally bright girl named Charlotte Simmons from the mountains of North Carolina who wins a scholarship to Dupont University (Duke). Wolfe follows her through her first semester on campus and draws a very disturbing picture of the campus culture, or at least one salient part of it, and shows how devastating it can be to someone like Charlotte.

Wolfe's novel is a magnifying glass on prestigious American universities which have largely abdicated any responsibility for policing their students personal lives. The result is a campus hedonism that turns people into human kleenex - something to be used, soiled, and thrown away, and for this privilege their parents pay upward of $40,000 per year. Sounds like a great investment.

Kerry Insults Dem's Intelligence

In the aftermath of the 2004 election there was no end of stories telling us either implicitly or explicitly how stupid red staters are for being Christians and voting Republican. Now comes a tacit admission from none other than John Kerry himself that when it comes to demonstrable boneheadedness Democratic voters are hard to beat:

Kerry supporters have charged that voting irregularities in largely Democratic areas made it difficult for voters to cast ballots in the November election. A lawsuit in Ohio cited long lines and a shortage of voting machines in predominantly minority neighborhoods, but the Ohio Supreme Court dismissed the suit.

Kerry also cited examples Sunday of how people were duped into not voting.

"Leaflets are handed out saying Democrats vote on Wednesday, Republicans vote on Tuesday. People are told in telephone calls that if you've ever had a parking ticket, you're not allowed to vote," he said.

If people really did decline to vote because the lines were too long, if they really did believe that they voted on a different day than the opposition, if they really did believe that a parking ticket disqualifies them from voting, then these people shouldn't vote anyway. They lack the basic qualification for being a voter in a free society - an IQ higher than the speed limit.

Democrats are a hoot. They derive a great deal of satisfaction from putting on intellectual airs, but they're forever having to admit that their base is comprised of a bunch of nincompoops. It was Al Gore, after all, who lost the 2000 election because Democrats in Florida were baffled by the ballot. Now John Kerry laments that his supporters couldn't figure out which polling place they were supposed to vote at or even which day they were supposed to show up.

The Dems might take solace from convincing themselves that they lost because Republicans are stupid Christians, but maybe somebody ought to do a study to see how each party would have fared in the last election if the right to vote had been contingent upon the results of an IQ test.