Rachel Maddow on MSNBC this evening, did exploratory surgery on Rand Paul’s political liver. His condition looks less than viable but he is clearly up to playing “dead man walking” for the rest of his term as junior senator from Kentucky. Rachel opens a new navel for Randy-boy by exposing how he plagiarized Wikipedia on a 1990s flick about pseudo-scientific eugenics in a dimly painted, “liberal” future of total genomic prediction and control of people’s life course from birth.
Speaking in support for Ken Cuccinelli at Liberty University, dubiously famed as one of the most intellectually stultifying institutions of tilted, “higher” learning in the country. There can be no doubt that the audience there received Senator Paul’s hacked speech with enthusiasm. Aimed against the “Liberal Bogeyman” so near Halloween, the crowd surely felt a richly sugared high from its ideological calories thrown from the podium.
In my previous article (#222) I opened window-shutters so readers could view Ted Cruz exposing himself in public life. My critique of Cruz applies equally to Rand Paul, who though he got enough education to practice opthalmology somewhere, seems limited in awareness of everything else not stemming from the opaquely ballooning bubble of disinformation and misconceived ideas rampant among the radically “right.” Reince Priebus clearly falls into the interior deep shade of that bubble by virtue of his “special” mental quality.
That is the mark by which he would ever get noticed enough by the powers in and behind the GOP for them to let him be RNC Chairman after seven rounds of voting. “Reinhold the Rinse” (or Wrench, if you will) was good enough at twisting arms to revive the party’s finances. He’d graduated cum laud from the Whitewater branch campus of the University of Wisconsin, according to Wikipedia, then graduated from University of Miami’s branch law school at Coral Gables, with a J.D. degree. The initials imply a doctorate in jurisprudence, yet they rate lower status than Ph.D.’s in law or other solid subject, for everybody who squeezes through any law school gets one.
Even Michele Bachmann has a J.D., from Oral Roberts University where she studied real, Christian craziness under a book-writing “expert” on how America was “founded as a Christian theocracy.” “Christian” here means evangelical fundamentalist. All are welcome who can abandon wide intellectual interest and continued, lifelong learning. Degrees are open to question and comparative evaluation. A friend of mine whose Ph.D
is of such high level accomplishment as to exceed new doctorate’s levels of learning by stratospheric reach in many directions, displays tolerantly humorous snobbery about some “universities” whose alumni delicately flaunt their alma maters’ glorious auras.
I myself have known Ph.Ds who, figuratively speaking, couldn’t figure their ways out of a cul-de-sac they’d walked into, stone sober. The strange thing about educated idiots is how they can be competent in ordinary, practical matters and yet see the world in such clear, simple terms as suggest they focus on life to no more than convenient depth.
For, if they raised their sights or focused more deeply, they would see the world as other than they had supposed. As parts of that more accurately seen world, they would also become deeper, more comprehensively feeling and perceiving examples of humanity. They would grow past limitations of class and the putting of concern for property way ahead of community and the well being of the world.
Implicit in my previous article (#223) on Ted Cruz, is the connection between religious upbringing or rearing in authority dominated, traditional model families in which children have “thou shalt not’s” laid on them before they get any sense of what they may be able to do. Strictures, more upon permissible thinking than behavior, deforms a young mind and hampers its operational development worse than an old operating system fails to enable a new computer. Basic rule? Nonsense in, nonsense out. One’s conclusions cannot improve on bad assumptions. Corrected data must enter the system. Kids have to go outside a home’s stale culture and get rebooted. It can be pretty hard. These kids have to cope with multiple imponderables that should fall to Ockham’s Razor. Do not multiply undemonstrated propositions or presumed entities.
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