Jesse Kornbluth was again good enough to visit my post commenting upon his article lauding Andrew Sullivan as a blogger amongst bloggers.  If I was a guy, and he and I had met in person, I would have slapped up on the back with a cheery “Hey, Jesse man, great to see you again.”  I’ve discovered that I disagree with Jesse on a whole lot of things, but I certainly appreciate his willingness to come back here and take his stand on the things in which he believes.  So, welcome, Jesse, and let me get right to your points.

Because his is a short comment, I’ll first print it in its entirety here, and then take on what I believe to be its fundamental deficiencies.  As always, my answer will be longer, because I tend to develop my ideas at greater length.  I’ll assume that Jesse does not do so because he is being a polite guest at another’s forum, rather than because he lacks the energy, will or data.

One of your message board commenters has said you’ve heard the last of me. Not so. I was raised to write thank you notes, and I do want to thank you, Bookworm, for taking the time and thought to deal both with my piece and my defense of it.
And I also wish to encourage you. You say you were not among those who doubted Barack Obama’s citizenship, but you do want to investigate his alleged brilliance as a student. You write:
As for me, I’m much more interested in Obama’s college and law school grades. I’d be interested to see whether they support the narrative that he [is] an unusually brilliant man. Since I find his off-teleprompter speech limited, unmusical and ill-informed, I have my doubts.
I can only speak to this investigation as it refers to Harvard. Consider:
BARACK OBAMA
— He was the first African American president in the history of the Harvard Law Journal. [This is generally considered the highest honor you can get at Harvard Law School.]
ANDREW SULLIVAN
— Harkness Fellowship to the Kennedy School
— His Harvard doctoral thesis, “Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott,” won the government department’s Toppan Prize, for the best dissertation “upon a subject of Political Science.”
JESSE KORNBLUTH
— summa cum laude thesis, “The Contradictions of Commitment in the Work of George Orwell”
— magna cum laude Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature
Just on the record of those three Harvard guys, you should feel encouraged to persist in this effort.
All best.

One of the fundamental differences between Jesse and me is that he thinks Ivy League credentials cover a multitude of sins.  I do not.  Whether you went to Podunk Community College or Hah-vahd Law, if you’re a dishonorable man (that would be Sullivan) or man who fails to demonstrate a well-furnished mind or any analytical ability (that would be Obama), or perhaps a man who is too forgiving of or naive about those who share his alma mater (Jesse himself), my focus will be on the matter at issue, rather than some yellowing diploma.

Much has been written about Obama’s tenure at Harvard.  Indeed, I’ve written on the subject myself, so my regular readers will pardon me for the repetition here.

I attended a premier public, not private, law school at roughly the same time Obama was gracing Harvard’s halls.  I was a good student, and a sociable one, so I interacted with many lawyers who worked at huge, well-paying, reputable firms.  Rather consistently, they told me that they hired Ivy League grads for the cachet, not because they were any good.

The lawyers’ complaints were always the same:  the Ivy Leagues had done away with reliable grading, either because of massive grade inflation or because they’d switched to a pass/fail system.  This meant that all the Ivy League (plus the Boalt) graduates they interviewed presented themselves as top-of-the-class brilliant people.  For a large percentage of them, this was a lie.  From the lawyers’ perspective, hiring one of these grads was like buying a pig in a poke.  It was reasonable to assume that the grads were smart because they’d gotten into a cachet school in the first place, but it was fatal to assume that they had the knowledge, skills or attitude necessary to become a good lawyer.  If you were lucky, you hired someone wonderful; if you weren’t, you could still boast that your firm was a draw to Ivy League lawyers.

Now that Obama’s past is no longer untouchable, people are revisiting his law school experience.  As Ace shows, even absent actual grades, one can figure out a lot of things about Obama’s law school performance.

Using a variety of sources, Ace explains that, when Obama attended Harvard, neither grades nor Law Review were done anonymously.  This was quite different from my own experience.  At my law school, our tests didn’t have our names, just random numbers, so the professors graded based solely on the test’s quality, not the test taker’s relationship with the professor or the test taker’s skin color.  Law Review admission was based upon those same blind grades or upon an essay that was submitted anonymously.  Again, no favoritism based upon anything but the work’s quality.

At Harvard, however, grades were not anonymous, which left a lot of wiggle room for those professors committed to affirmative action.  Also, when Obama was there, in the interests of that same affirmative action, the Law Review had an explicit set-aside of spaces for blacks.  The obvious message to those blacks who made it to Harvard law was that, once there, they didn’t have to try very hard.  The driven ones worked hard because it was their nature.  As for the less driven ones, though, why bother?  You’d still get the perks and honors. Obama’s failure to publish anything of note while on Law Review is so unusual that, in the absence of his academic records, it’s reasonable to assume that he was not one of the driven ones and that he got his august position for reasons other than academic merit.

The magna designation beside Obama’s degree leaves me equally cold.  It turns out that about half the Harvard law class was magna.  Garrison Keillor must have been thinking of Harvard when he spoke of a place in which “all of the children are above average.”

Because Obama has refused to release any of his academic information, because his off-teleprompter speeches reveal a surprisingly ill-informed man (his is the opposite of a well-furnished mind), because his work history is invisible or lacking in any achievement beyond getting a series of  increasingly higher ranking jobs, and because racial preference was rampant in the grade-free environment that was Harvard law, I can’t pretend to be impressed by his diploma.  The diploma is a mere piece of paper when compared to a man whose most significant accomplishment seems to be impressing gullible liberals.

Andrew Sullivan’s academic credentials don’t move me either.  The world of academia is a hermetically sealed world in which having the right ideas (by which I really mean the Left ideas) regularly trumps the more important markers of decency, morality and common sense.  As only a sort of aside, my uncle was reputed to be the most brilliant student ever to graduate from the Jewish Gymnasium in pre-war Berlin.  He was also a miserable, angry Communist who ended his days, not in a haze of academic glory, but as a low-level civil servant pushing paper in a small government office in Denmark.  His embittered, ugly personality were of much more importance in his life than either his brains or his education (an education far exceeding in quality anything Harvard has to offer).

Sullivan is too old to point to his sheepskin as a mark of intellectual quality.  The true evidence of his intellectual and moral quality — or, as I argue, his striking deficiencies in both those categories — is his current work product.  As I’ve demonstrated in other posts, so won’t belabor here, that work product is dishonest, disingenuous, lazy, mean-spirited, defamatory, obsessive and antisemitic.  But other than that, he’s a great product of America’s finest school.

As for Jesse himself, as one of my readers commented, he graduated with high honors at a time before Harvard’s grading system was corrupted by the modern post-deconstructionist Marxist garbage that passes for education in this day and age (not to mention the fact that professors today are embarrassed to give bad grades to young people whose parents have coughed up $50,000 per year for them to hear the tripe that so often passes for knowledge at schools today).  For that, I commend him.  He’s clearly a bright man.  But my focus has been narrow:  I think Jesse betrayed his intelligence and education when he blithely praised Andrew Sullivan, a man with no moral compass and a vicious streak as wide as the Charles.

Back to you, Jesse.  You know you’re always welcome here.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

The Bookworm Turns : A Secret Conservative in Liberal Land,
available in e-format for $4.99 at Amazon or Smashwords.

Speaking of Harvard, I just got a gander at Harvard Magazine, which has a smugly grinning Andrew Sullivan on the cover, as the exemplar of “The New Media.”  I thought the article would be about bloggers generally, but the table of contents tells me I’m wrong:  “World’s Best Blogger?” it asks.  It then explains that the article is about “Andrew Sullivan, fiscal conservative [huh?] and social liberal, navigates the changing media landscape.”  Turn to the article itself, and the caption says:  “World’s Best Blogger?  Andrew Sullivan’s views are predictable in only one way:  always stimulating.”

To give you an inkling of the level of research that goes into this type of sycophancy — sycophancy that’s mailed on a regular basis to all Harvard grads — get a load of this exchange between one reader of the article (which is on the internet) and the article’s author, Jesse Kornbluth.  First, the reader comment:

Andrew Sullivan didn’t engage in partisan speculation (or, for that matter, ascribe partisan blame) after the Tuscon shootings?? Really??

What world are you living in??

Perhaps it is the same one Sullivan is living in, there one where he still believes that Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy.

The guy is one step short of wearing tin foil on his head. If that’s your criteria for world’s best blogger, then you’ve made a very good choice. Just ask yourself this question: If Andrew Sullivan were as “relentless” in asking Barack Obama for HIS birth certificate, would you still consider him the blogger of the year?

Yeah, didn’t think so. (nor should you; but I guess it’s OK, because his utter lunacy is directed at someone you both mutually hate).

Second, Jesse Kornbluth’s polite, but utterly clueless, reply:

As the author of the piece, I could respond better to these charges if you’d cite some specifics. Namely: could you provide a link to Sullivan’s Tuscon coverage in which he points a finger at a group or person who directed the shooter? And, in regard to Governor Palin, could you provide a link to a passage in the Dish where Sullivan makes the claim that she’s not Trig’s mother? Many thanks. JK

In about one second, any doofus can summon up myriad posts Sullivan did about Palin and Trig, or can find conservative comments castigating him for his lunatic monomania.  Here are a bazillion such links.  The same holds true for Sullivan’s hysterical screeds about Tucson.  But someone who wrote an entire article about Sullivan for the glossy Harvard Magazine was not only unable to find evidence of his quixotic little obsessions in the first place, but also was either unable to do so (or couldn’t be bothered to do so) in the second instance, when someone brought those facts to his attention.  You’d think that a Harvard grad (Class of ’68) could do better than that.

Andrew Sullivan is a bright guy.  He’s also one of the people I credit with helping me cross the Rubicon from political Left to political Right.  I was a New Republic subscriber for years.  When he took over as editor, his editorials were so ludicrous and hysterical, I started getting jaundiced with the magazine and ended up being open to new influences.  (Same holds true for Paul Krugman, whose anti-Bush hysteria leeched out any credibility from his writings, again sending me looking for more intelligence in political and economic commentary.)  I have reason, therefore, to be grateful to Sullivan.  But to laud the guy as a great thinker — he’s simply not.  And for someone to write a whole laudatory article about the man without being aware of one of his overriding political passions (that his, his obsession with the identity of Trig’s birth mother) or of his ill-informed, partisan, post-Tucson rants, reveals lazy thinking, lazy research and lazy writing — which, sadly, is about all I expect from a lot of Harvard’s brand nowadays.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

The Bookworm Turns : A Secret Conservative in Liberal Land,
available in e-format for $4.99 at Amazon or Smashwords.

The language is blue, but don’t let that stop you.  Read it.  Read it all.

My favorite line, incidentally, is this one:

Despite her underprivileged background Professor Kagan rose to the challenge and graduated magna cum laude, an honor reserved for the top 89% of Harvard Law alumni.

Right there is one of the dirty little secrets of the America’s top private universities back in the 1980s, when Elena Kagan (and Barack Obama) attended.  I don’t know if it’s true know, but I know it was true then.

It was in 1988 that a Stanford math professor explained to me how the system worked back then:

People paid a whole lot to get their little darlings into Stanford (or Harvard, or Yale, or whatever other prestigious school you can think of).  And coming in, there was no doubt but that their little darlings were the best of the best back at the hometown prep schools and high schools.

Each of those incoming students suddenly found himself in a Garrison Keillor situation, with all “all of the kids . . . above average.”  Once they were all packed into that little brilliant pond together, logic would dictate that a bell curve would come into play, with some of those above average kids showing academic skills ahead of or, sadly, behind the pack.

It turned out, though, that Mummy and Daddy got upset when their darling, who was class valedictorian at her fancy New York prep school, proved to be less capable than her college classmates.  After all, why would Mummy and Daddy pay Stanford $50,000 a year so that their baby could bring home a C or, worse, fail?  The answer was for the school to say that, because everyone was brilliant, regardless of actual classroom performance, everyone should therefore get a good grade.  Or failing that, students who could not possibly satisfy even the minimal grade requirement for a given class should be asked, quite politely, to leave that class, with no record and no repercussions. Net result:  Students happy, parents happy, school happy.  Future employers . . . well, not so happy.

What the Stanford professor told me wasn’t anomalous.  When I was a law student down in Texas, also in the 1980s, I knew a lot of employers, employers at big, fancy, well-paying Texas firms, who wouldn’t hire Boalt grads.  They still hired Harvard grads, because they couldn’t make themselves back away from the cachet (which is a big deal in Texas), but they drew the line at Boalt.  They told me that Boalt’s grading system was so “student friendly,” they had no idea if they were getting someone who was solidly in the middle of the bell curve, or the kid who couldn’t be bothered to show up to any classes.  Texas, by the way, graded on a very strict bell curve.

So read and enjoy Iowahawk but know that, despite the tongue in cheek, every word of it is true!

Jennifer Rubin has a very good post today about the reasons that the “smart” Obama may be struggling so mightily to be a good president.  She offers three basic reasons that may explain Obama’s ineptitude, whether it touches economics, diplomacy, or national security:

First, the punditocracy confused credentials with knowledge or smarts.

[snip]

Second, even intelligent and well-schooled people can be poor managers, bad decision makers, and indecisive leaders.

[snip]

And finally, as Ronald Reagan said, “The trouble with our liberal friends isn’t that they are ignorant; it is that they know so much that isn’t so.”

I agree with everything Rubin says about the gross inefficiencies and thinking errors even smart people can display, except for one thing:  I disagree with her fundamental premise.  I don’t think Obama is smart at all.  I think his reputation for smarts is one of the great cons foisted on the American people, greater even than the con that Gore and Kerry, both of whom were undistinguished college students, as their transcripts show, were smarter than Bush, whose transcripts reveal him to  be a slightly better student than those two “men of genius.”

We have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Obama is smart.  To begin with, we have no evidence at all of his academic abilities.  (And I will concede that, while academic smarts don’t demonstrate functional intelligence, they are still a good yardstick of a brain that operates at a fairly high level.)  We do not know how he did in Indonesia, his high school years are a blur, we do not know what happened during his stint at Occidental, we know nothing about his Columbia years, and the only thing we know about his Harvard years is that he made Law Review.

Liberals like to point to the Columbia and Harvard attendance (let alone the Law Review) as evidence in and of itself that the guy is smart.  After all, only smart people go to those schools.  Au contraire, my friends.  Thanks to the poisonous influence of affirmative action, an influence alive and well during Obama’s entire academic career, only smart whites and Asians go to those schools.  If you’re black and ambitious, you can into and stay in those schools despite less than stellar academic showings.  Columbia and Harvard need black admissions, and neither can afford for those blacks, once they’re in the school, to appear to be failing.

Let me insert here that I very strongly believe that that blacks can qualify for Columbia and Harvard on their own terms.  I am not publishing here a racist disquisition about black intelligence.  Anyone who reads that into what I’m writing here is reading me wrong.

What I am saying, is that if you set the standards lower for one racial group than for others, three things will happen:  First, the race that has the lower hurdles will stop trying as hard.  After all, humans are rational creatures, and people working towards a goal are wise to work only as hard as they need, and no harder.  Why expend energy unnecessarily?

Second, those members of the race who are fully capable of competing without a handicap will also behave rationally and conserve their energy, because it’s the smart thing to do.  This means that the lower hurdles will deprive them of the psychology opportunity stretch and prove themselves.

Third, a lot of people who would not normally have been in the race at all will bob up to the top, thanks to that handicap.  Worse, if there is a critical mass of mediocrity floating along on this tide of affirmative action, those mediocre people will inevitably, through sheer numbers, become representative of the racial group.  In other words, if you give enough mediocre people in a specific racial group a head start so that they win, it looks as if all the winners from that particular racial group are mediocre.

The above realities mean that you end up with two dire situations for the racial group that affirmative action infantilizing:  First, an enormous number of useless people become very poor representatives of their race.  And second, people who are genuinely good and deserving of recognition end up being thrown in the hopper of useless beneficiaries who achieved high status without ability or effort.

My argument is that Barack Obama is one of the number of useless, mediocre people who, thanks to affirmative action, have been elevated to a position far above their natural abilities.  The absence of grades is not the only indication of Obama’s intellectual weakness.  (And believe me, if his grades were good, they’d be published in every paper in America, including the want ads.)

Everything Obama’s turned his hand to — except for using people to advance his career — has failed.  The Annenberg Challenge was a $100 million disaster.  His legal career was, to say that least, undistinguished.  (I should add here that junior associates always have undistinguished careers.  There’s just not that much scope there.)  His tenure as an Illinois State Senator was marked by dithering indecision, coupled with the intelligent strategy, for a stupid person, of simply vanishing when the votes came around.  The same holds true for his career in the United States Senator.  If you examine those two tenures in political office without the gloss of the media love affair, all you’ve got is plenty of nothing.

Obama’s professorship at the U. of Chicago law school was equally undistinguished.  He published nothing.  His disquisitions on the Constitution show he knows nothing.  That is, he doesn’t even have the true intellectual’s excuse of fully understanding, but nevertheless arguing against, the language of the Constitution itself or the standard interpretations of that language.   I pity the students who had his class.

All that the liberals can hang their hat on is that one book:  Dreams.  And even that is proving to be a remarkably weak reed.  Jack Cashill has argued compellingly that Bill Ayers was the book’s principle author.  Cashill has a two pronged attack for this.  He demonstrates first, that Obama’s known prose stylings at the time (wooden, obfuscatory, cant-like), are completely unlike the fluid, artistic prose that gets people so excited about Dreams.  I personally find that argument compelling, because I’ve always been struck by Obama’s ugly language when he’s off a teleprompter.  This is not a man with any love for English.

The stylistic argument is also an easy argument to bat down.  It’s always possible to point to a moment of incredible inspiration, when everything in the brain clicks and things just roll out like magic.  That’s why I have a tab at my blog with an old poem of mine.  I like to have it there because it’s a reminder that when we are inspired, when someone makes incredible demands upon us, we’re all capable of great things.

Cashill, though, is too smart to stop with the “it doesn’t really seem like his writing” argument.  In article after article, he’s demonstrated that, stylistically, the writing is just like Ayers’ writing; that in terms of world view, the writing is just like Ayers’ writing (including all the nautical references that sit so well with Ayers, the former merchant marine); that anecdotally, the narratives precisely track events in Ayers’ life, right down to the description of the lavish mansion in which Ayers’ one-time girlfriend lived.  I won’t summarize everything Cashill writes, but I do urge you to read his whole series of articles on the subject, which you can find here.

Conspiracy theories, of course, are easy.  More than thirty percent of the American public believes that the Bush government brought down the Twin Towers so that Cheney would have an excuse to get government contracts for Halliburton in Iraq.   Never mind the death of 3,000 innocents, never mind the impossibility of keeping such a vast conspiracy absolutely secret, nevermind the fact that Cheney didn’t work for Halliburton, and nevermind that those government contracts were anathema to Halliburton, because it had contracted for them a decade before, in a different economy — to the conspiracy theorists, all of the dots always connect.

For conspiracy theorists, life is always like that scene in the movie A Beautiful Mind, in which the genius gazes at thousands of random newspaper clippings taped to his wall and, in an instant of inspired schizophrenia, sees them all connect in a vast network of relationships.  Except . . . except that Cashill has one weapon in his arsenal that no conspiracy theorist would ever have:  completely independent corroboration of the fact that a panicked Obama, sitting on a $150,000 advance and utterly incapable of writing, high tailed it over to Bill Ayers house, and got all the help he needed.

All of which gets me back to Obama.  None of the apparent indices of brains pan out:  no grades, no job record, no book.  Nothing at all.   His sole talent, and I have to say that it’s a spectacular one, is to be a con man.  He has a deep voice, good looks, and a network of behind the scenes operators who have been deeply invested in his advancement.  The only problem with running a con, as Harold Hill discovered when he had to produce that “boys band,” is that, if you stick around after you’ve run the con, people expect you to perform.  And Obama, who has none of the advertised talents, is utterly trapped.

The great pity for the American people is that, unlike the clever con man in a Broadway show/Hollywood musical, there is no miracle at the end when faith and love suddenly operate to produce the strained tones of the Minuet in G.  All we’re hearing now is silence, a few cricket chirps, and the scary drone of muezzins and nuclear bombers in the background.

UPDATE:  Right on schedule, a link about the genius that is Al Gore.  This is not the only example, of course; just the latest.