{"id":9122,"date":"2010-03-08T09:28:19","date_gmt":"2010-03-08T14:28:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=9122"},"modified":"2010-03-07T20:29:07","modified_gmt":"2010-03-08T01:29:07","slug":"the-sole-sign-of-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=9122","title":{"rendered":"The Sole Sign Of Intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was listening to MPR last night, and caught an episode of “MPR Presents” that reprised a speech by the honorable Cory Booker<\/a>, mayor of Newark, New Jersey.\u00a0 Mayor Booker has apparently had good results running Newark, a city that is one of America’s longest-running punchlines due to its blight, violence, corruption, incompetence, and history of crime both organized and random.<\/p>\n

Booker is a Democrat, Afro-American, and in many ways from the same model as President Obama; from upper-middle-class roots (his parents were IBM executives), and a former “community organizer” (spending a few years living in one of Newark’s projects, and several months in a motor home which he’d park at drug-traffic-prone intersections around the city).<\/p>\n

Unlike Obama, he’s actually had some substantial effect on his city.\u00a0 Crime has fallen under his administration, and after hiking taxes in the first year of his term, he’s held the line on budgets and spending since then.\u00a0 He’s far from the most profligate liberal in New Jersey public life; like Barack Obama, he was elected to his biggest office to date in 2006; one might be forgiven for wishing that if the Democrats had <\/em>to pick a not-overly-experienced candidate for pure camera value, they’d picked Booker instead of Obama.\u00a0 This is, by the way, a statement against interest for me; he’s a liberal.\u00a0 But one should give credit where it’s due, while working to do better still (and noting that it was a Republican, Brett Schundler, who first showed that a corrupt Jersey cesspool could have potential, in Jersey City in the nineties).<\/p>\n

Booker’s also a highly edumacated person, for those of you for whom paper credentials obtained before age 27 are important; Booker has bachelor and masters from Stanford (where he became pals with liberal shrieking head Rachel Maddow), a Rhodes Scholarship to Queens College at Oxford, and a JD from Yale. He was also an all-Pac 10 football player at Stanford.<\/p>\n

And as I listened to him speak, I was reminded of the great media meme from eight years ago, when waves of America’s pseudo-intelligent tittered like snarky eighth-grade girls when George W. Bush pronounced the word “Nuclear” “NOO-kyu-lar”.\u00a0\u00a0 This, the born-again mean girls declared, was a sure sign of stupidity.<\/p>\n

Anyway – I listened, interested, as Booker, the highly-educated, very accomplished mayor of one of America’s most intransigently-difficult cities, spoke about a meeting with Colin Powell.\u00a0 Booker asked Powell what was the greatest threat facing America.\u00a0 Was it terrorism?\u00a0 Poverty?\u00a0 Income imbalance? Was it…<\/p>\n

“NOO-kyu-lar proliferation?”<\/p>\n

Wow.\u00a0 I guess he’s really not only an idiot, but white trash to boot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was listening to MPR last night, and caught an episode of “MPR Presents” that reprised a speech by the honorable Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, New Jersey.\u00a0 Mayor Booker has apparently had good results running Newark, a city that is one of America’s longest-running punchlines due to its blight, violence, corruption, incompetence, and history […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9122"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9125,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9122\/revisions\/9125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}