“There is something profoundly diseased about a society that idolizes its ignoramuses and disdains its experts.” http://bit.ly/cpIlEf
“There is something profoundly diseased about a society that idolizes its ignoramuses and disdains its experts.” http://bit.ly/cpIlEf
What gives Klein the right to decide who is qualified to be a member of Congress, and who isn’t?
Common sense? Logical faculties? A brain?
I mean really, this is just a dumb question. What gives ANY of us the right to make such a judgment? What gives YOU the right, gahrie, to opine that Barack Obama is a bad president? You and Joe Klein have the same right, as citizens of a country that guarantees free speech, to reach your own conclusions and to express them freely. Klein just has a larger audience than you do, because someone, somewhere along the line, decided that his opinions are worth something. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, but either way, it makes no sense to question his “right” to voice his opinions. It’s not like he’s saying, “I, Joe Klein, hereby decree that Christine O’Donnell isn’t qualified to be a senator, and I therefore exercise my Double-Super-Secret Awesome MSM Powers to forbid Delaware voters from selecting her! Alakazam! It is now illegal to vote for Christine O’Donnell!”
And, yes, I recognize that you aren’t literally questioning his legal right to have an opinion — you mean more of a moral or ethical right, or something. Like he’s violating some unspoken code of conduct by being so condescending as to judge a candidate’s qualifications from his Liberal Elite perch. But… why?!? It’s not like there’s something inherently evil about making a value judgment about whether somebody’s qualified for office. Conservatives certainly did that about Obama back in ’08, and more power to ’em. We all have that “right.” At the end of the day, Klein is just a guy with an opinion, just like you and me. I happen to think his opinion is generally right. You think it’s generally wrong. Fine. But it makes no sense to question his “right,” in any sense, to say what he’s saying.
I don’t know enough about O’Donnell to dispute whether or not she really is an ignoramus, but I absolutely dispute Klein’s characterization of Palin, and that makes the rest of his judgment in this article suspect — not that he had much room for error since he’s been around for a long time and his ideological predispositions have been obvious and well-known since before Primary Colors.
I will say that, yes, there is an anti-establishment, anti-elite tendency that is growing in American politics, and it is not wholly good, pure, and productive. But I think criticisms of this tendency miss the point. The anti-elite sentiments being capitalized on by the Palins of the world are growing stronger because they are a direct reaction to the overreaching, overbearing zealousness of the political elite to force-feed the people their vision of what America should be. In sum, the former is stoked by the later. Railing against the former is a waste of time unless and until you recognize its root cause and address that first. Instead, what we are seeing is the pro-elitists hardening their positions and growing louder in their disdain for ordinary Americans, and ordinary Americans increasingly being disenchanted and supporting candidates like Palin and O’Donnell — and whoever else is willing to stand up and fight against the elitists. Both extremes offer a preponderance of bad policy prescriptions for the country, but if I had to choose my lot, I’d take my chances with the “ignoramuses” who are ready to start tearing down the unaffordable and crumbling edifices of liberal elite government institutions. They may not have the know-how to smartly construct replacement policies and institutions, but that’ll at least give the rest of the conservative movement time to regroup and step in once the passions have died down and people are ready again for rational discourse.
*latter, not later