Friday, June 10, 2005 :::
 
A Certain Pudgy, Balding English Teacher was watching TV with a friend when Jay Leno poked fun at John Kerry's poor performance at Yale. His grades, if you missed it, were released along with his military recoreds, which should have been released,oh, you know, last summer. In any case, Mr. Kerry apparently performed admirably in the military, as all his fellow sailors reported, but he did not do so well at Yale. In fact, he did worse than someone who was there at about the same time named "Bush." When Mr. Leno took entirely justified aim at the good Senator, the friend expressed his surprise.

Why is that? Lots of liberals felt surprised. During the campaign, Sen. Kerry was singulgarly bad at answering reasonable questions, though he was good at looking ponderous. And there is nothing stupid about Mr. Bush. A glance through a book of supposedly horrifying Bushisms revealed that he has a tendency to change the grammatical subject midflight, yielding disagreement between singular and plural, and to conflate idioms, both of which are probably the result of the same personal quirk, which is not even vaguely the same as stupidity.

There is a big difference between the men, however: Mr. Bush can make decisions. The outgoing Canadian ambassador embarrassed himself by recounting his surprise when he met with our cabinet. Mr. Bush was completely in charge. Now, as regular readers of this blog will know, it is the opinion of A Mind That Suits that Mr. Bush can make spectacularly bad decisions. But that really is better than being unable to decide anything, except that you would think it pretty cool to be President.

And it is annoying that liberals like to think they are smarter. Why, then, do they support "Whole Language Learning," as opposed to phonics? Phonics teaches kids to read, "Whole Language" doesn't. Period.

As recounted in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg came in vowing to save the schools, and then promptly hired some factulty member from a grad program in education. Big mistake. Wide application of "Whole Language," and a dramatic decline in already poor scores among inner city children, exactly the ones who would be MOST liberated by the discipline of reading well. There is, one supposes, a word for clinging to a theory even when the facts contradict you, but that word is NOT intellectual. Intellectuals do it all the time, but that doesn't mean it is a smart thing to do. And when you know (or should know) full well that by inflicting your theories, you are actively hurting underprivileged children, it becomes hard to think of you as moral, either, but the Left likes to say they are that, too.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 9:42 AM


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What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually.