Joe Barton overestimates his own intelligence

There was a story I heard around right wingers about George W. Bush, and it typically revolved around some high-level meeting or other with some expert giving a presentation. The people at the table would take turns grilling the expert on various things, and then George W. would pipe up after seeming to have been bored with the whole thing and ask some incredible penetrating question that really "pierced to the heart of the matter."

I'm as skeptical of this hagiography as you are (though I have no doubt that Bush spent lots of time in meetings looking bored), but it says something about the perception of intelligence in certain quarters of the country. Here Bush as portrayed as having some ultra-honed "common sense" that more than makes up for his lack of knowledge and intellectual curiosity, and in fact allows him to outwit experts in their own areas of expertise.

It must be from this same perception of intelligence that causes Rep. Joe Barton (R-where else?) to make a fool of himself thusly. Here he is playing the part of the Incredible Man with Uncommon Common Sense:

Via TPM
Ouch, right? Not so fast: Barton apparently later tweeted:

"I seemed [sic] to have baffled the Energy Sec with basic question - Where does oil come from?"

yeah, educated-sounding presidents are THE WORST!

Why does Obama stay short on details so often? Among other reasons, it could be because this is the reaction he gets from the supposedly-details-hungry press when he offers them some substance:

For just under an hour on Tuesday night, Americans saw not the fiery and inspirational speaker who riveted the nation in his address to Congress last month, or the conversational president who warmly engaged Americans in talks across the country, or even the jaunty and jokey president who turned up on Jay Leno.

Instead, in his second prime-time news conference from the White House, it was Barack Obama the lecturer, a familiar character from early in the campaign. Placid and unsmiling, he was the professor in chief, offering familiar arguments in long paragraphs — often introduced with the phrase, “as I said before” — sounding like the teacher speaking in the stillness of a classroom where students are restlessly waiting for the ring of the bell.

Yeah, what the hell, Obama? No one wants to sit and listen to whole paragraphs about the collapse of the economy. What's with all this smarty talk, with numbers even?! This is TV, for God's sake; you're cutting into NCIS! Can't you just bow your legs, squint, and say, "we're gunna git'em varmints!" like the last guy? He was entertaining, and so strong and folksy!

Do us all a favor: next time we tell you we want details, just substitute an Old West-sounding catchphrase. Those are so cool!

That quoted paragraph, by the way, isn't from FOX News, or Yahoo! Entertainment News, or Maureen Dowd's catty, superficial editorial column. It's from the New York Times. At the top of the homepage. The first two paragraphs.

What I think is most interesting about this reaction is what it says about these reporters' opinion of the American people. Apparently the vast majority of us who bother to watch pressers are either insufficiently affected by the economy to care about this stuff as anything more than entertainment, or too stupid to pay attention through "long paragraphs." Apparently all journalism, no matter how serious the subject matter, is just entertainment now.

"volcano monitoring"

Come to think about it, I'm not through with Jindal yet. The "volcano monitoring" budget line he was mocking is essentially funding for the United States Geological Survey. I know we can't expect a Rhodes Scholar like Jindal to understand this, but the scientists of the USGS don't just play with rocks in national parks: they do work that not only saves lives, but the scientists themselves often give their lives in service to this country.

Let's talk about David A. Johnston, for instance. Johnston was a scientist with the USGS 30 years ago, charged with monitoring Mount St. Helens during the 1980 eruption that killed 57 people. It was Johnston who theorized that the eruption would be a lateral one, bursting out of the newly formed northern bulge of the volcano, rather than a conventional one spewing from the summit. He is credited on the USGS website with having likely saved thousands of lives by convincing the authorities to give the volcano a wide berth and not reopen it too soon.

Johnston was himself one of those 57 casualties. He was on duty when the volcano erupted, having just enough time to radio "Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!" before he was swept away.

I'd like to see someone ask the governor what he thinks about "erupting" government spending on the salaries of people like Johnston.

The Party of Beavis and Butthead

Krugman:

And leaving aside the chutzpah of casting the failure of his own party’s governance as proof that government can’t work, does he really think that the response to natural disasters like Katrina is best undertaken by uncoordinated private action? Hey, why bother having an army? Let’s just rely on self-defense by armed citizens.

The intellectual incoherence is stunning. Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.

You have to wonder how Jindal could have honestly believed that people would've reacted to his poking fun at "volcano monitoring" with a "yeah, how wasteful is THAT?!"

Shockingly, his choice of project to poke fun at is even sillier than that "fruit flies in Paris, France!" turd Sarah Palin flung in the last election. At least in her defense, most Americans are probably not immediately aware that a huge proportion of genetic and biological research is done on fruit flies because of, for instance, their extraordinarily rapid reproductive pace, and that French scientists are major players in the scientific community. Thus, if you're a redneck, millenarian wackadoo trying to hoodwink 200 million voters into giving you the keys to General George's digs, and you want to pick on scientists who do important work by obscuring and mutilating their research in such a way that it sounds wasteful, "fruit flies from Paris, France" is not a bad way to go. I would wager, however, that most people who hear "volcano monitoring" know exactly what you're talking about, and why funding it is probably a good idea.

Hey Markos

I think I speak for many of the readers of this tiny blog when I say, in reference to point 7 of this post, that a "doctor" (from the Latin word for "learned") is a person with a "doctorate" degree, be it in medicine, physics, or classical literature, you anti-intellectual, technocratic asshat. Truthfully, I'm shocked that someone with a law degree doesn't know that already, and that someone so liberal is so reflexively hostile to academics.