St00pidest Things Ever Said... Part The Sixth

So, serioulsy... could this occasional feature have gone much further without hearing from AEI shill and all around neocon ass-monkey David Frum?

No, of course not... and his entry, while perhaps not quite on par with hall-of-lamer Falafel O'Reilly, is nevertheless quite the stunning piece of dada, if for no other reason it demonstrates how fast and how savagely the wheels have come off the logic bus over at AEI.

With no further ado, I present to you: Federal Student Aid Is Ruining Our Nation's Educational System

Now, this, in and of itself is not anything really new, especially from the hivebrain over at AEI. However, when I heard him spewing this on NPR, what really got me was the following bit that he was using as intro.

"Imagine if the Republicans had retained their Congressional majority and the first thing they did was suggest big new subsidies for, say, the oil industry. Would there no public outrage?

But that's exactly what the Democrats are now offering their staunch supporters in academia. The Democrats are proposing big new subsidies for college tuition: new loans, new grants, new tax deductions. Nancy Pelosi, the new Speaker of the House, promotes these giveaways as a way to make college more "affordable." "

This bit of horrific sophistry is what qualified this for St00pidest Things Ever Said.

Because in one fell swoop, it claims that subsidies and give aways to the politically connected, already fabulously wealthy petro-chemical industrial giants is the moral, political and economic equivalent of helping poor kids afford college... I especially love the sneer quotes around the word "affordable." What's weird, is that when he read this on air, you could actually hear the sneer quotes.

Don't worry, it gets better. He actually posits an arguement that kids are encouraged to forget all that great high school AP material by getting subsidies to attend expensive colleges ... according to a "recent survey.

You know, the intellectual dishonesty of these people is stunning. Even a cursory examination of the survey shows what everyone already knows, American college kids are not into history and civics, so much. Somehow, Frum manages to focus his massive coal fired difference engine with laser-like precision to deduce that this is now a national crisis directly being caused by Pell Grants and low interest student loans.

But there is a much uglier reality that Frum only hints at, but the initiated know, and you kinda have to read between the lines. The problem is that college should only be for the star-belly sneetches, and the rest of you should just get on with flipping our burgers and cleaning our kitchens... We are dilluting the intellectual and social gene pool of academia by making college accessible to the unwashed masses, and these surveys prove it...

Not that Frum would come right out and say that. No, he is too circumspect for that. Instead, he will simply make bogus, and unfounded claims that the federal government is ruining the nation's colleges by helping young people afford it, who might otherwise just end up in the tire-retreading factory.

mojo sends