Linkage

I hesitated for quite a while before creating this post, mainly coz I'm just sick to death of political sniping.  But it's election season, so what does one rightfully expect?  There WILL be lotsa "yer stoopid!" and "Yeah? Well, yer eeeevil!" and all that other horseshit we're so fond of throwing around this time o' year.  And we're not casting aspersions towards any of our favorite blogging friends.  Well, mebbe we are.  You KNOW who you might be when trying on that shoe.  And you're NOT of the female persuasion.

But we digress.  What the sergeant REALLY wants to do is link another piece o' brilliance from James Taranto in today's WSJ.  An excerpt:

When Sarah Palin called Obama a "professor," some professors accused her of racism. What she really meant, they claimed, was "uppity." Kloppenberg's similar characterization, however, draws a quite different response:

Those who heard Mr. Kloppenberg present his argument at a conference on intellectual history at the City University of New York's Graduate Center responded with prolonged applause. "The way he traced Obama's intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama's academic background seems so similar to ours," said Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University who helped organize the conference.

One assumes that Andrew Hartman is a serious scholar, although one doesn't know for sure because one has never heard of him. Barack Obama, by contrast, is a scholarly dilettante, a professional politician who has moonlighted as a university instructor.

Yet Hartman's remark about Obama's "academic background" is revealing. Professors imagine Obama is one of them because he shares their attitudes: their politically correct opinions, their condescending view of ordinary Americans, their belief in their own authority as an intellectual elite. He is the ideal product of the homogeneous world of contemporary academia. In his importance, they see a reflection of their self-importance.

Mr. Taranto's brief bit is less a criticism of our president (although he does get his licks in, as always) and more a well-deserved thumping for academic twits who have a tendency to confuse their asses with their elbows.  I'm always up for that kinda stuff.