Who IS this guy?!

'Niceguy' Eddie

Political Talk Show Host and Internet Radio Personality. My show, In My Humble Opinion, aired on RainbowRadio from 2015-2017, and has returned for 2021! Feel free to contact me at niceguy9418@usa.com. You can also friend me on Facebook.

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Thursday, April 1, 2010

Lord, I was born a rambling man...

Sorry, this... is a bit RANDOM.

I got into a bit of a tiff the other day on MMFA over the idea of CREDENTIALS.  Now I, perhaps unwisely, bragged about my MBA, from the Univeristy of Michigan, which I recieved with honors.  Now... I was NOT trying to say "Look at the big brain on me!"  That's what my BLOG is for. ;)  I was merely pointing out a few credetnials that I had to show that I had SOME idea what I was talking about in refuting the SPECIFIC POINTS of Glenn Beck's grand master plan.  Also, I pointed out that Mister Beck had only his HS diploma to go on.

Now... WHY is this important?

Well, for a start, they don't teach much in ther way of Macroeconomics in most High Schools in this country, and the only bits you're going to pick up doing AM Talk Radio and hosting a show on Fox are easily debunked RW talking points.  (Easily disputed by liberals with MBA's who paid attention in MacroEcon, anyway!)

Now, a poster called Poproxx77 attempted to refute my points by saying George Bush (and a few other RW'ers) must be smarter than me because they went to Harvard or had PhD's, where as I went to U of M and have only a Master's.  Now... I wasn't suggesting Glenn Beck was stupid because he didn't graduate from college.  Neither did Bill Gatres.  But where as Gates built a trillion dollar empire and changed the world prfoundly.  Beck, OTOH, is paid a lot of money to spew talking points that someone else wrote for him, or that he cribbed from RW sources.  As usual, the Right continues to listen to the LOUDEST voice, rather than the most well infomred or educated.

And besides: I don't care who's smarter, or if Harvard in better than U of M or who got C's and who got A's.  The economic facts remain on MY side, and not on Beck's.  And being STUPID isn't the reason he's backing this plan.  (Just the reason his audience is buying it!) It's because he's EVIL.  It's becuase he wants to screw over the middle class and working class and poor (you know... 90% of America?) by drastically cutting spending, and save the RICH by drastically [their] cutting traxes. (And, of course, HE'S RICH.) The fact that Geroge Bush went to Harvard has no bearing on the fact that this BS plan would destroy the economy while doing NOTHING to fix the defiict or pay down our natinal debt!  OTOH, it may go a long way towards cringing about that civil war he keeps predicting.  Maybe he's just hoping all that Ammo and canned food he stocked up on doesn't go to waste!

But at no point did Poproxx really dispute what I was SAYING about Beck's plan! In fact, at one point he even admitted we were saying the same thing! (But somehow reaching radically different conclusions, I'd like to add!)  It seemed to really bother him that I was educated.  So I did some digging and found a few oldies, but goodies.

First was this 2000 classic from Slate: Don't Hate Bush Becuase He's Dumb.  In this case "classic" is a bit of a dubuious distinction, because while it's dead-on regarding Bush, it takes the typical cowardly Slate route and tries to create artificial equivalencies in a effort to achieve [unecessary] balance.  Sometimes thigns just aren't balanced!  Bush was an idiot, and his presidency was a disaster.  See how easy that is?  But THAT wasn't the article I actually had in mind.

THIS piece of RW Garbage was!  Did any of you guys get this in you in boxes back in 2000?  My favorite line might be:
"In his sophomore year at Harvard," the Post reported, "Gore's grades were lower than any semester recorded on Bush's transcript from Yale."

Do you know what they're leaving out?  Well, that Gore went onto to graduate from Yale Cum Laude.  See how that works - the guy with the better OVERALL record is the loser, because between the two he had the worst single semester.  He may have had also the best 4 or 5 - and he woudl have HAD to to graduate cum laude after such a slow start - but that's no too important, is it?  (Why let facts get in the way of good propaganda.)

The thing is, that between the two articles emerges a critical point.  It is not how SMART or EDUCATED you are, but whether or not you recognize that trait in others, and which policies you want to pursue that matter. It matters the VISION you have. Gore foresaw the potential of the internet and made creating it a legislative priority.  Did he INVENT it?  No. (And as we all know, he also never claimed to have!) But he was smart enough to recognize the vision of the people that DID.  He likewise recognized the dangers posed by global warming.  Is he a climate researcher? No.  But he's smart enough to recognize the work being DONE in that field and, unlike Bush, actually LISTENS to REAL SCIENTISTS rather that industry whores who just tell him what he wants to hear.

And THAT'S really why conservatism is so dim, intellectually speaking.  They can never see the way forward.  They can never see the potential rewards or risks of anything that not in there immediate sight.  They operate under the constant assumption that we know all there is to, and that thsi is the best it gets. Or really, that we peaked about a generation ago, and we need to get BACK to that.

You know, back to when before we knew any better.  The good old days.  When women couldn't vote, Jews and Blacks weren't allowed on Golf Courses and seperate water fountains meant shorter lines for everyone!

Maybe it's not intellignece that Gore possessed, so much as WISDOM.  It seems even a bit more high-falootin' to put it that way, but that the difference being BEING a scientist, and recognizing that these guys know what the hell they're doing!

7 comments:

  1. While I generally agree with most of this piece, there are a couple of things I'd amend:

    1.) Our Crawford Dauphin (AKA Junior Bush) doesn't really have a Ph.D he earned -- he got an honorary doctorate from Yale in 2001. His highest educational accomplishment prior to that was an MBA from Harvard Business School. (Of course, he may not have really earned that either; Dubya was rumored to have paid some 'brainiacs' to help him cheat on tests, a common practice of the legacy frat buys back then, not to mention that some of his professors may have been reluctant to fail the son of a VIP for intra-college political reasons. Legacies like the Bush boy are similar to sports stars in other schools in that regard.)

    2.) It doesn't really matter what 'rodeo clown' Glenn Beck's level of education is, nor his training in macroeconomics or any other discipline -- he's a cynical grifter who's latched onto a successful right-wing shock jock routine that earns him millions. Like his forerunner Limbaugh, he discovered verbal car wrecks attract an audience, especially from the knuckle-draggers on the right. He is a man without a sincere bone in his body, as proven by the video where he jokes about putting Vick's VapoRub under his eyes when he wants to tear up. Beck is not an honest broker of conservative ideas -- his antecedent is P.T. Barnum rather than Barry Goldwater. He just knows it's easier to sell ignorance and jingoism to the blindly ignorant goose-stepping nationalists on the right. Aside from that, I think some watch him just to see when he finally melts down on air.

    Appreciate your comments on MMFA, BTW.

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  2. Cool, I get to ramble too.

    Being a religious nutcase, I was once pressured into believing in a young earth. So I decided to get to the bottom of it, and in order to handle all the arguments I had to go way deep to the bottom, to journal articles on isochron dating and other things, before I could return a verdict in favor of the scientists.

    So even though argument from authority and argument from majority vote are fallacies, the following are still true:

    1) it takes forever to really settle an argument the "right way"

    2) if you're a non-expert and you think "i don't think the experts considered x", the experts did consider x, repeatedly and exhaustively

    3) since the other side has fake experts, we need to either identify the fake experts or appeal to majority vote among the experts

    So if two regular joes are debating and one of them has the experts on her side, that person wins and that's the end of it. If you think the majority of experts are wrong, you better be an expert, and you better be arguing against other experts.

    If you're debating a moron, you can probably toss out one fact and end it. But if you're not debating a moron and you engage on the facts, the thread will go forever and it will dissolve in a soup where nobody wins. That might be fun anyway, but if you want to win and you're in a hurry, appeal to the experts.

    And that's why the mainstream media sucks, by the way. Almost everyone in it is expert in absolutely nothing.

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  3. Rick Janes ("I'm Rick Janes Bitch!"?),

    Yeah... it's hard to trust the "Ivy League" when it comes to Senators son's, etc... Even without alledged cheating, they like their legacies a little too much, IMHO. LOVE the Vick's Vapo rub stuff BTW. I hadn't heard that. And here I fell for it to... although I just assumed he was a pussy. LOL.

    Thanks for your comment.

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  4. Steeve,

    Love your three points, especially (2). That's thje one the climate deniers in particular always seem to trip over, isn't it? And yeah, (3) is pretty much why the media sucks. But that's what you get with a for-profit press: They have to SELL the story, rather than TELL the story. And contentious controversies are a LOT easier to sell than "Scientists today settled the matter once and for all" is. LOL

    Thanks for your comment.

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  5. The education argument is broken.

    I agree with you regarding the possession of wisdom. Bush seemed to lack it, and it appears conservatives are building a culture around such absence.

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  6. Eddie, now I know why you put "Niceguy" in quotation marks! I thought the "Rick Janes bitch" stuff was retired with Dave Chapelle. ;)

    I should have posted this with my initial comment. Here's the video from Crooks and Liars, and the title says it all: "Glenn Beck's Sobbing Secrets Revealed: A Little Vick's VapoRub..."
    http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/glenn-becks-sobbing-secrets-revealed

    Steve, you're right about most armchair and TV 'debates,' but I have seen college-level debates where both sides have prepared that often do reach a resolution on the question offered. Of course, those take an hour or more and include the kind of detail that is anathema to our Big Media.

    Also there is the tendency of the right to just lie in debate -- during the 1988 election, in a televised 'debate' between Father of the Creature Poppy Bush and Michael Dukakis, the elder Bush knowingly told a lie that went uncorrected. Long after the election, one of his campaign people cynically said that 20-30 million people heard the debate lie and believed it. The correction the next day was only seen or heard by 2 or 3 million, and the Bush campaign profited from this. This is the way the GOP has rolled ever since, and it was working for them until the economy went all to hell and the majority caught on to how dumb and vile Junior really was.

    At any public political debate there should be an ombudsman armed with a computer and Google who could in 'real time' correct any factual error on the spot. But fat chance of that happening in the United States of Delusion where we wallow in lies and myths.

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  7. Rick Janes,

    Sorry about that. I figured [I'm Rick James bitch!] had reached "classic" status by now! LOL

    I'm with you on that Google / moderator idea. I can just imaging in the '08 Biden / Palin debate, Biden would have been CORRECTED a few times - like when he said 'hamas' instead of 'hezbolah' or 'syria' instead of 'lebanon'. (Basically the verbal equivalent of typo's.) Where as PALIN would have been called out on whoppers. (Like Alaska producing 30% of the U.S. Energy supply, for example?)

    Unformtunately, as it is, FactCheck.org & Company (useful tools though they are) are usually a day late and about 10 Million subcribers short.

    Thanks for your comment.

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