Elites vs Us the tea partiers

Another good article from the Washington Post. This one by Charles Murray who has been in the crosshairs of "the elite" ever since he wrote Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.  The "Elite" have been at odds with his conclusions on intelligence and race. Here is his latest: 

The tea party warns of a New Elite. They're right.
The tea party appears to be of one mind on at least one thing: America has been taken over by a New Elite.

"On one side, we have the elites," Fox News host Glenn Beck explained last month, "and the other side, we have the regular people." The elites are "no longer in touch with what the country is really thinking," Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle complained this summer. And when Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell recently began a campaign ad by saying, "I didn't go to Yale," she could be confident that her supporters would approve.

All this has made the New Elite distinctly touchy (see Maureen Dowd's "Making Ignorance Chic"), dismissive (see Jacob Weisberg's "Elitist Nonsense") and defensive (see Anne Applebaum's "The Rise of the 'Ordinary' Elite").

"Elite?" they seem to be saying. "Who? Us?"

Read it all here.

Rush and the Elite, it makes me think of Truman

Truman was part of a political machine but not an elitist, not of the elite.  He was from Missouri for heaven's sake!  He had an accent, too!! Oh dear, think what they would say today!
From Human Events:

Battling Political Elitism with Rush Limbaugh
by Jedediah Bila

Rush Limbaugh routinely hits home runs when battling the Left’s intolerance, hypocrisy, and tax-and-spend agenda. But on October 1, he hit a grand slam against what’s eating away at the conservative movement right in our own backyard—political elitism.

Rush addressed his monologue “to those of you who are embarrassed of Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell and the Tea Party in general, Sharron Angle, maybe Carl Paladino rubs you the wrong way. You think they're nuts, they embarrass you. I mean they're conservatives and they're Republicans and so are you, but you think they're a little kooky. You don't even think they can win.”

He declared, “I want people who have lived lives, who have made mistakes, don't care who knows it, they've learned from them, they've made amends, and they have moved on with their lives. I'm tired, frankly, of Republicans throwing candidates under the bus for not being the political equivalent of Mother Teresa or not being professional enough to get elected.”

Amen to that.

Many of us have watched conservative big shots and members of the media elite lash out at Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, and others. Why? It’s simple: Despite the fact that Palin, O’Donnell, and Angle sport strong conservative messages, those messages haven’t arrived in the conventional, Beltway-approved packages that appeal to many of Washington’s political elite.

I completely agee.  Read it all.

Tell me again, just who is it that "Just doesn't get it?"

Yes, we are definitely the great unwashed and uninformed out here. This is from CNS via Lucianne.com

Congressman Says Climate Science Should Be Simplified to ‘Sixth Grade Level’ Because Americans ‘Don’t Get’ It

By Christopher Neefus

Americans are growing skeptical about the threat of global warming because “they don’t get” the complex information that scientists deliver, according to Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.).

Unless scientists can simplify their arguments to the level of newspapers that “print at the sixth grade level,” Cleaver said, the public is “going to get a headache and bail out.”

Cleaver made his comments to a panel of scientists on Capitol Hill at a hearing last Thursday of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

I hope someone makes this guy apologize, but even if he did it wouldn't be his true feelings, we know what they are.  He thinks we are stupid, gullible plebians.

Victor Davis Hanson on our ongoing Revolution

Reflections on the Revolution in America

America’s Extreme Make-over
These are exciting though scary revolutionary times, akin to the constant acrimony in the fourth-century BC polis, mid-nineteenth century revolutionary Europe, or — perhaps in a geriatric replay — the 1960s. This is an era when the fundamental assumptions of the individual and the state are now being redefined, albeit in a weird, high-tech, globalized landscape.

Radical But Well Off

A word of caution: we are not talking about hoi polloi versus hoi oligoi, or the commune on the barricades fighting the estate owners. No, not this time around.

Instead, the present attempt to remake America is the effort of the liberal well-to-do — highly educated at mostly private universities, nursed on three decades of postmodern education, either with inherited wealth or earning top salaries, lifestyles of privilege indistinguishable from those they decry as selfish, and immune from the dictates they impose on others.

Such are basically the profiles of the Obama cabinet and sub-cabinet, the pillars of liberalism in the Congress and state legislatures, the public intellectuals in the universities and foundations, the arts crowd, and the Hollywood elite. Let us be clear about that.

The Distant Poor

They are all battling on behalf of “them,” the poorer half of America, currently in need of some sort of housing, education, food, or legal subsidy, whom the above mentioned elite, in the way they live, send their children to school, socialize, and vacation so studiously avoid. (The New York Times owners are likely to follow the cut-throat business practices of Wall Street, live in the most refined areas of New York, and assume privileges indistinguishable from other CEOs; the difference is that they so visibly care about those they never see or seek out).

Note well the term “poor.” These are not Dickensian or Joads poor, but largely Americans who by the standards of the 1940s would be considered lucky. Partly because of globalized Chinese consumer goods, and partly redistributive practices of a half-century, our current “underclass” has access to clothes, electronics, entertainment, apartments, cell phones, transportation, etc., undreamed of by the middle class of the recent past. I live in one of the poorest areas of one of the poorest counties in a bankrupt state; and those I see poor are not like those I saw 40 years ago in the same locale.

There is much more but he ends with this;

The Mind of the Revolutionary

Where do these ideologies derive? Again, I wish I could say that they are grassroots driven, by the muscular classes who are victimized by business and, in their cry-from-the-heart protests, demand a fairer cutting of the pie. But so often the utopianism is from above, and predicated on abstract education, relative affluence, and little exposure to business or indeed much beyond the metrosexual world in general.

So fascinating these modern revolutionaries. A Buffet does not choose to pay the high income tax rate on his earnings, though he surely could in lieu of lecturing how taxes are too low. A Gates Sr. does not plan for his offspring to pay into the strapped treasury needed inheritance taxes, though he remonstrates that they must be raised on everyone else. A Geithner does not comply with the tax code, though he assumes it should be raised on others. A Gore lectures on honesty and truth and science on his way to a $100 million con that turns him from an affluent ex-politician into a global grandee.

I’m sorry — I don’t take seriously much of anything from this wannabe revolutionary bunch.

Read it all here.

I'm Not Insulted, I'm Outraged

There are several good articles from the Washington Examiner I'm linking today, this is the first.
Obama's nanny care insults the American spirit
By: Michael Barone

You are victims. You are helpless against the wiles of big corporations and insurance companies and you need protection. You need the government to take over and do things you cannot do for yourself.

That is the thinking of what David Brooks calls "the educated class" that favors the Democrats' health care bills. Members of this elite spout tales of woe of people denied coverage or care with the implication that there but for the grace of government go you. So sign on and the government will take care of everything.

It's an argument that has often been appealing to Europeans but that has always been unappealing to Americans. That's why these advocates segue to other arguments, like Barack Obama's assertion that the government can expand coverage and save money at the same time.

But voters quickly sniff out what this means....

I like what Michael Barone says here.  Read more at the Washington Examiner:

Writings from Obama's Past

 RayH has pointed out I need to clarify here, not everyone has as much time I do to sit at the computer and read all this "Stuff."
 UPDATE Below original post. 
I saw several postings at different blogs on this yesterday. James Lewis at American Thinker blog has this one that seems to sum up the talk from yesterday.
Obama on the legal implications of Einstein's Relativity
Quote from the Washington Post:

"This is someone who in law school worked with [Harvard professor] Larry Tribe on a paper on the legal implications of Einstein's theory of relativity," said senior adviser David M. Axelrod. "He does have an incisive mind; that mind is always put to use in pursuit of tangible things that are going to improve people's lives."

Unquote.

Hmmm... should we be impressed?

What is astonishing --- what's mind-boggling --- but explains a lot --- is that:

1. Lawrence Tribe, always mentioned as the next Supreme Court nominee, would lend his name to such utter sophomoric moonshine, thereby exposing himself to ridicule from the entire Harvard Faculty, and screwing up his chances to ever get to the Court.

2. That Obama himself would fall for it --- as the elected chief honcho of the Harvard Law Review! (Although it may explain why nothing he wrote ever got published).

3. That David Axelrod, supposed PR genius, would cite this arrant nonsense as a point IN FAVOR of his boss.

4. That a WaPo reporter would publish it in a recitation of why the man in the White House is sane after all, even while expecting the Democrats in Congress to commit political suicide for the greater glory of Obama.

There is a lot more along these lines, you will like it, read it all.

UPDATE 1st from Powerline:

How meaningful is the Obama-Tribe connection?

Here's one we can file in the ever-expanding "much ado about nothing" category. The New York Sun reports that, as a law student, Barack Obama assisted Harvard's Larry Tribe with an article Tribe wrote for the Harvard Law Review called "The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn From Modern Physics." The Sun claims that Obama's view of the Constitution is "hinted" in Tribe's piece.

2nd From Frank J. Tipler in Pajamas Media

Obama vs. Einstein

According to the Washington Post, David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s senior advisor, said that the president worked with “[Harvard professor] Laurence Tribe on a paper on the legal implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity.” I’ve read that paper, “The Curvature of Constitutional Space.” It’s complete nonsense. It shows no understanding of Einstein’s theory of relativity, or of the relationship between relativity theory and Newton’s theory.