NEAL STARKMAN & MOVEON.ORG... INTELLECTUAL GIANTS
Junior High School All Over Again

Catching up on emails, as I wrote before, I love James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today" and I came across his commentary on a guest column in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as few days ago. The guest columnist, Neal Starkman, displays his intellectual giantness (or it is intelligencer?) by writing his column like a 12-year old boy (going down to his level? yes, i can.) on why people like President Bush. Also after you read his article you really have to question the Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorial staff's judgement in printing it, but then I found out below that their staff actually wrote about Rachel Corrie (who Starkman refers to, but shows his true level of intelligencer since Corrie was left-leaning), who killed herself, and actually wrote her death was "leaving our lives a little richer." Excuse me? A little respect for a person's life is in order here. No wonder in how they actually printed Starkman's article now. Anyway, I'll take a stab and bet Neal Starkman is actually a friend of one of the staffers at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Moveon.org continues to prove my tool shed analogy with their founder, Wes Boyd, revealing to be one of the dullest of them all. His immaturity in not taking responsibility for the poor taste of ads on his website comparing President Bush to Hitler reminds me of junior high school all over again. Just read below.


Best of the Web Today - January 6, 2004

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By JAMES TARANTO

Dumb and Dumber
Is Neal Starkman as smart as he seems to think he is? If so, his article in yesterday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer ("intelligent as a post") is a spoof. And in that case, hooray for Starkman for a hilarious jape at the expense of the P-I's editors. In a deadpan tone, Starkman poses the question: Why do people like President Bush? Here's his answer:

It's the "Stupid factor," the S factor: Some people--sometimes through no fault of their own--are just not very bright.

It's not merely that some people are insufficiently intelligent to grasp the nuances of foreign policy, of constitutional law, of macroeconomics or of the variegated interplay of humans and the environment. These aren't the people I'm referring to. The people I'm referring to cannot understand the phenomenon of cause and effect. They're perplexed by issues comprising more than two sides. They don't have the wherewithal to expand the sources of their information. And above all--far above all--they don't think.

You know these people; they're all around you (they're not you, else you would not be reading this article this far). They're the ones who keep the puerile shows on TV, who appear as regular recipients of the Darwin Awards, who raise our insurance rates by doing dumb things, who generally make life much more miserable for all of us than it ought to be. Sad to say, they comprise a substantial minority--perhaps even a majority--of the populace.

This article has received a fair amount of attention from conservative bloggers, and the assumption seems to be that it's on the level. It may well be; certainly, as we've noted before, those on the political left flatter themselves that they represent the cognitive elite.

But the reference to the Darwin Awards makes us wonder. "The Darwin Awards honor those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it," according to the awards' Web site. In other words, they "honor" people who die as the result of their own stupidity.

Might Starkman have meant this as a sly reference to terror advocate Rachel Corrie, and thus a dig at the Post-Intelligencer, which lionized her last month? Corrie's story, of course, is classic Darwin Award material; she got herself killed because she thought standing in front of a moving bulldozer would be a good way to make a political statement. We don't know for sure what she thought of President Bush, but she did like to burn the American flag, so we're going to go out on a limb and guess she wasn't a fan of his.

Anyway, spoof or not, can't you just imagine the excitement Starkman's manuscript must have generated when it arrived in the Post-Intelligencer newsroom? We picture the editors sitting around, open-mouthed, exclaiming: "Duh, wow! This article is awesome! We really are intelligencer than everyone else!"

It's Your Fault We Called You Hitler!
The far-left group MoveOn.org has been holding a contest for anti-Bush television ads, and it's come under fire for a pair of ads posted to its Web site that compared the president to Hitler. Now MoveOn founder Wes Boyd has issued a statement. While he acknowledges that "we agree that the two ads in question were in poor taste and deeply regret that they slipped through our screening process," he says the real blame lies with the Republicans for drawing attention to them:

The Republican National Committee and its chairman have falsely accused MoveOn.org of sponsoring ads on its website which compare President Bush to Adolf Hitler. The claim is deliberately and maliciously misleading. . . . None of these was our ad, nor did their appearance constitute endorsement or sponsorship by MoveOn.org Voter Fund.

There's a theme here, isn't there? First we have these ads comparing Bush to Hitler, which show a childish ignorance of history. They seem to be based on the syllogism: Bush is bad, Hitler was bad, therefore Bush was Hitler. (The S factor indeed.) The ads get posted to the MoveOn Web site because of a now-acknowledged lack of adult supervision--and then, rather than simply accept responsibility for this rather grievous error, Boyd lashes out at Republicans, as if his incompetence and his members' stupidity and viciousness were their fault.

This is politics as it might be conducted by 12-year-old boys. No wonder MoveOn types have latched onto Howard Dean, known for such juvenile utterances as "I am somewhat of a street fighter. If someone punches me I am apt to chase them down and I need to be restrained by the people who know better and have been in the game longer than I have." Is the Democratic primary race a political campaign or is it "Lord of the Flies"?