It's only natural that some people in Washington are calling for the abolition of government funding for National Public Radio and, in some cases, for the complete cutoff of money to all public broadcasting stations. They accuse NPR of liberal bias and of being "elitist." All very natural, if......you consider anything "liberal" that you disagree with and anything "elitist" that you can't understand.
The folks who spout most of the anti-NPR steam are the same people who gave us those two great intellectual presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and such other sterling minds as Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin. Face it, the current crop of anti-eggheads are not particularly bright. Witness Senator James (there ain't no climate change) Inhof, the Sage of Oklahoma.
I realize the Bogus Economist is opening himself up to a charge of hypocrisy here, since he generally advocates a lessening of name-calling and a return to civility in political discourse. O.K. Let me modify my stand and open it up to something reasonable:
Let the American people know more about the mental capabilities of their legislators.
Since the "conservative" members of Congress are always complaining about the low test scores of our nation's schools and advocating merit pay for its teachers, why shouldn't the people demand to know the SAT scores of the people who are doing the complaining?
Wouldn't you like to know Mrs. Palin's grasp of, say, geography? I'm convinced our recent former president couldn't have passed a freshman test on grammar, to say nothing of logic. What would Inhof do on a GED? If we had known the intellectual limitations of some of our national leaders, would we still have elected them?
It seems idiotic to leave our political future up to a bunch of ad men and PR artists, whose instructions seem to be based on spin, fiction and outright lies. Why not ask our politicians how smart they are instead of how slippery? Will we as a country have a better chance to regain world leadership if we're led by a bunch of dunces?
Sure, brains alone don't guarantee anything. But it might be instructive to know that the only budget surplus we have had since 1980 was under Bill Clinton, widely acknowledged to be among our smartest presidents.
I bet he listens to NPR.