Seriously. Where in the hell did that apostrophe come from? What the hell is wrong with the OP? What was she thinking? Is our children learning?
A ‘D’ in English? That’s unpossible!
It came from your keyboard, bad keyboard.
I’ve seen articles like this:
Obama’s appointments not liberal enough
Maybe for once we have a president that won’t be surrounding himself with his conservative or liberal buddies but rather finding the person best fit for the job.
Maybe for once we have a president who’s goal it is to not push a liberal or conservative agenda but an agenda of doing what’s best for the country parties be damned.
Go 'way! I’m ‘batin’!
-Smeghead, current Ivy League PhD student
The biggest fault with the original post isn’t the punctuation, it’s the narrow timeframe selected. The “norm” almost certainly does not mean only the 8 years of Dubya’s administration. The “norm” is drawn from a much longer span of time.
Well, I would have liked to go there as well - but not all of us can. I could have attended a far more selective school than Pitt - but these were more expensive and that was a consideration. It is today as well for most of these schools.
Well, what about the Naval Academy? Or Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College? Or Kansas City Law School?
Look, I don’t think this is terribly important - but it is revealing in a way. And while too much can be made of this, there might be a problem here both in perception and in the quality of advice President Obama might get from this crowd.
I recall the wife of an old Air Force buddy of my Dad – they live in Denver – on a visit to Florida one time, complaining about the “Ivy League Mafia” – smartass dogooders proclaiming de haut en bas (not her words, of course), “We’re here to help you!”
Yes, it’s a very ignorant outlook – we’re talking here about the good kind of “elitism” – but not so much so as to be entirely dismissed out of hand; elitism as such always has certain odious characteristics that can’t be washed away, and the non-elite will never miss the scent.
At any rate, it’s an outlook millions of Americans share.
You know, I was going to point out that the article first talks about ‘the norm’ and then goes on to talk about how Clinton had “intellectuals” in his cabinet. As did FDR and JFK (apparently, Republican presidents get all their picks from Special Olympics Medal winners), so the ‘norm’ Mr. MacGillis is talking about is the norm for the last 8 years.
If I were a conservative, I’d want to punch Mr. MacGillis right through his non-thinking cap.
As you can read in Before the Storm and Nixonland, both by Rick Perlstein, it was part of the “liberal consensus” of the 1940s and 1950s that government and administration should be in the hands of educated Ivy-League experts, and that was one of the things the conservatives who backed Goldwater in 1964 and Nixon in 1968 were rebelling against. Their perception, right or wrong, was that those WASP* elitists (few non-WASPs attended Ivy League schools in those days) were necessarily indoctrinated by their educational institutions in a liberalism scarcely distinguishable from Communism.
*And I’m using WASP in a class-specific sense. As Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “George Wallace might have been a white Protestant of Anglo-Saxon descent, and rather vocal on all three points, but a WASP he was not.”
one of these things is not like the other
Are you learning to become a Legal type guy, so you can ask for those court thingies?
You mean this part:
And the remarks about JFK’s Camelot are equivocal at best.
And botched that miserably.
The conclusion to be drawn is that insularity - no matter whether the source is Ivy League schools, or or one’s own idiot acquaintances - probably isn’t a good thing for a nation with problems as diverse as ours currently seem to be.
While that is true, the author of the article made a poor case for this. It’s one thing to leave the hallowed halls of Harvard or Yale to take a political appointment. Most of Obama’s appointments seem to come with real world experience, as is the case with his picks for Secretary of Defense and National Security Adviser.
Quite true. Nevertheless, ceteris paribus, the POTUS is much likelier to get good advice from Ivy League grads than from grads of the Naval Academy, Southwest Texas State Teachers College, or Kansas City Law School.
Obama’s cabinet picks clearly aren’t that smart. He has yet to tap Colbert for anything.
I doubt St. Stephen swings that way. 
Seriously. And the guy was almost president.
I bet he would for a Cabinet post.
I’m quite irked by the generally anti-intellectual attitude which assumes that people who are in academia, or related to academia, are automatically somehow unable to actually think about, or care about, real issues relating to real people.
Here’s an exchange I had with Liberal about this topic a few years ago: