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Washington Times' Wes Pruden: Drowning the elites in the gene pool
[Wash Times] The 2016 elections are a gift that keeps on giving, and nothing has been sweeter than watching the chattering class being taken back to school. Rarely has smug arrogance been so sharply rebuked. It’s delicious to watch. Yum, yum.The pundits and talking heads particularly relish the finding in the exit polls that most of Donald Trump’s votes appeared to be coming from white working-class stiffs "without a college education." What should you expect from someone who had never seen the inside of the Student Union? A college education is a fine thing, and a few years with access to a library and a conscientious professor is a reward that pays dividends for a lifetime. "A mind is a terrible thing to waste," as a familiar television commercial once reminded us. Or as an earlier vice president, Dan Quayle, put it, "it’s a terrible thing to lose your mind." But a college education is no substitute for a native appetite for knowledge, wherever found and however acquired. Harry S Truman was one of our most lettered presidents; no other president and few historians had his knowledge and understanding of the office and of the presidents before him. Yet he never attended college, and had to go to work behind a brace of mules on the family farm and could not finish high school. He turned out to be one of the nation’s most effective presidents, presiding at a particularly troubled time, first in war and then in tense peace. Abraham Lincoln read the Bible and borrowed books to read by the flickering light of the fireside. "Educated" or not, he turned out pretty well. A college education is not a requisite for casting an intelligent ballot, either. William F. Buckley, a Yale man and an educated consumer of the book of knowledge, said he "would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone book than by the entire faculty of Harvard." Nevertheless, the book-proud sometimes never get over a sheepskin. David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, despaired on election eve of the grim consequences of enabling the white, the less educated and those deprived of a college education to cancel the votes of the credentialed. Hillary calls them the deplorables. Posted by: Besoeker 2016-11-13 |
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