Here is an excerpt from a recent post by one of you.
____is the most uneducated, unprepared, and idiotic man to ever take the postion as _______. He needs to do what is right for the american people, not the american elite. This country was founded by the people and for the people...not for your personal agendas Mr. ______
I intentionally put blanks for the person actually named and same for the office though given our circumstances I suppose it is obvious who he meant. My point is this, the objective of a college education should be to develop critical thinking skills and analytic ability. By that I mean the abiltiy to unemotionally analyze and draw conclusions without preconceived bias. Tom Sowell made the very correct point the other day that this virtually never happens on talk tv or radio anymore, everyone always has a preconceived conclusion and never changes their opinion. To wit, this comment above is being made about Dems and Libs about Bush, previously virutally the SAME comment was made by Republicans and so called conservatives about Clinton, go ahead, substitute either name, and you have the 'argument' made by the other side at that time.
This is standard fare to what passes as polic science in Liberal Arts but I expect more from business students. Logically this is called an argumentum ad hominem, literally an argument against the man. The complaintant can only personally attack the person, there is not criticism of their programs or policy. If this were a movie actor that might have validity but certianly not for a policy maker. What is lacking is any public discourse about what the other side would do, or what should be done, or how the policty was flawed and therefore failed. Indeed such attacks are bereft of any intellectual argument at all.
AS I have mentioned in replies on the blog, actually most of the people that have recently been president came from the SAME EXACT COLLEGE no less-Yale for both Bushes, Clinton, Gore, and Ford before them. Even Carter went to the Naval Academy, ditto for Eisenhower-West Point and Kennedy was Harvard (the current Bush actually can claim Harvard and Yale). Lack of education, no worse, they all have the SAME education, no chance for many new ideas from this bunch.
As for the comment that this shold not be about personal agenda, gee why do you think these people run for office anyway, for public service! PLEASE, do you think An Inconvenient Truth is anything but a personal agenda, or the Bush ivolvement in Saudi, is that not a personal agenda. Do you think Edwards would not oppose tort reform, that is how he got rich and that would certainly be his personal agenda. Lyndon Johnson's father went broke a couple of times, clearly Lyndon made sure that would never happen to him and left office with his own media conglomerate, another personal agenda. We could go on endlessly here but
My point is that as far as choice of rulers we are about back to the French aristocracy, remember the French finally got so exasperated that they separated Marie from her own head!Yet the two parties have so gerrymandered the entire country that we have had virtually the same choices the last six or seven elections. Dole and Bush names were on I think no less than six presidential ballots as one or the other. Now Gore and Clinton share about the same distinction. This is choice? All rich folks educated at Ivy League schools? What is lacking is any substance of policy debate. Instead we get a silly political argument lately about eight attys getting canned, don't these people have anything to do other than attempt to make the other party look bad? Is anyone looking out for me? Where is the debate on something that matters like
our failed drug policy
our failed war on poverty
our failed school system, why don't we have vouchers
our failed border policy
our disastrously complex income tax law that wastes time and money and gains no one anything for all the time spent on it
our ever growing federal govt-a dpt of commerce that does not make anything, a dept of education that does not educate, a dept of agriculture that does not grow anything and is bigger than ever for a smaller than ever ag sector, a dept of transportation that does not transport anyone, geez...who needs this stuff...
Here is an idea, after the disasters of Katrina and Walter Reed, why not contract these services to private agencies that do a better job anyway? Wal Mart responded faster to Katrina that the FEDS, any hospital is probably better than the VA, who ever heard a great VA story? IF we can contract out prisons (CCA), why not the FED GOVT?
no policy debate, no critical thinking,l each party spending more than the other each time they get in charge, geez, would you buy stock if the FED Govt was a public company?
DLE
