A week and a half ago, at a Tea Party rally in Troy, Michigan, the GOP presidential contender Rick Santorum said this: "President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob!" To rapturous applause, Santorum went on: "Ther Full Story »
Posted by Jack Dinkmeyer - via Siva Vaidhyanathan
The basic theme of the article is the president oversells the pro values of education–be it college or trade school–but undersells the con downsides, mainly crushing debts of student loans (the interest of which, banks are promising to double). Thus, like so many outrageous and brainless right wing pronouncements, Santorum’s statement deserves to be ignored. Although I cannot put my finger on it, something seems missing from the article. And it suffers from the surprise trick that Santorum and Obama think the same about something.
So, Santorum’s claim that Obama wants everyone to go to college to become Marxist deconstructionists was wrong. In fact, it was so wrong it didn’t even survive Fox news, where, presented with evidence that Obama, like him, favored all kinds o educational opportunities, including but not limited to college, Santorum repllied, sheephishly, “Maybe I was reading some things” that gave him the wrong impression, and “if it was an error, then I agree with the president.”
Could it be the major reason radically conservative right wingers are so against higher education–or education of any sort other than creationism and biblical mythologies–is that an educated electorate poses a real danger to those “never-never land “facts” they pull out of thin air whenever confronted with true facts and reality? That an intelligent populace has the abstractive wherewithal to see right through their exorbitant lies and distortions?