This kind of he-said-she-said False Equivalence journalism is infuriating and is the prime reason why nobody trusts the corporate media any more which is why the newspapers are dying:
Academic Elites Fill Obama’s Roster:
…..All told, of Obama’s top 35 appointments so far, 22 have degrees from an Ivy League school, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago or one of the top British universities. For the other slots, the president-elect made do with graduates of Georgetown and the Universities of Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina.
While Obama’s picks have been lauded for their ethnic and ideological mix, they lack diversity in one regard: They are almost exclusively products of the nation’s elite institutions and generally share a more intellectual outlook than is often the norm in government. Their erudition has already begun to set a new tone in the capital, cheering Obama’s supporters and serving as a clarion call to other academics. Yale law professor Dan Kahan said several of his colleagues are for the first time considering leaving their perches for Washington.
“You know how Obama always said, ‘This is our moment; this is our time?’ ” Kahan said. “Well, academics and smart people think, ‘Hey, when he says this is our time, he’s talking about us.’ ”
But skeptics say Obama’s predilection for big thinkers with dazzling resumes carries risks, noting, for one, that several of President John F. Kennedy’s “best and brightest” led the country into the Vietnam War. Obama is to be credited, skeptics say, for bringing with him so few political acquaintances from Illinois. But, they say, his team reflects its own brand of insularity, drawing on the world that Obama entered as an undergraduate at Columbia and in which he later rose to eminence as president of the Harvard Law Review and as a law professor at the University of Chicago…..
What a load of bull!
A society builds Universities for a reason – as places where the best and the brightest, surrounded by the other best and brightest, gain knowledge, skills and wisdom, as well as humility that comes from having one’s ideas challenged by colleagues every day. These are the places explicitly built to train the new generations of leaders – people who have a good grasp of the way the world works and a good understanding of the best ways to deal with the curveballs that the world throws at people and societies. These are exactly the kind of people a country needs to lead it.
Where else can one gain such knowledge and skills? You can learn fist-fighting skills out on the street. You can learn how to fudge books in the business world. You can learn how to sing hymns in church. You can learn how to ignore reality, spin fairy tales and destroy the English language in right-wing “think” tanks. But the honest useful skills are learned only in the academia.
Why is Washington Post, in this piece (and most others, this is just the latest example), inserting irrelevant opinions of “conservatives” and so-called “skeptics” (really ‘pseudo-skeptics’)?
Over the past 28 years, and especially starkly over the past 8 years, every single “conservative” idea has been shown in practice to be wrong and dangerous. The conservatives, what’s left of them (although many of them erroneously, for historico-local reasons, think of themselves as conservatives although they are not, or label some liberal ideas as ‘conservative’ although they are not) are out wondering in the wilderness.
So, why should any media outlet ever ask any conservative for any opinion on any topic? They have been proven wrong on everything, their ideology is dead, and their opinions are irrelevant (except for the humor segments). Inviting a conservative (or a Republican, because these two terms are today, more than at any time in history, equal and interchangeable) on a show is just like inviting a Creationist on a show when the topic is a new finding in evolutionary biology. Quoting conservatives in a newspaper article is just like quoting a Global Warming Denialist in an article about climate change – irrelevant, laughable, wrong and, yes, dangerous because it gives the audience the wrong idea that conservatism still deserves respect. It does not.
With conservatism debunked and dead, the next opposition party to the Democrats will come from the Left, not Right.
No, it is not the loss of advertising that dooms newspapers. It is not the unruly, wild bloggers. It is their own dishonesty. Let them die. Now.
Douglas Baird, who hired Obama at the University of Chicago, noted that whizzes can also have too much faith in their answers. But he said Obama is confident enough in his own intellect to challenge others’ conclusions. He recalled watching Obama hold his own with erudite faculty members.
“He goes into a faculty club filled with Nobel laureates, and he talks to them on equal terms — there hasn’t been anyone in the White House like that for a long time,” Baird said. “So it’s not as if, when he’s given advice by powerful, smart people, that he’ll get swayed from his core principles. And if you’re confident you’re going to stick to your own principles, then you might as well surround yourself with smart people rather than dumb ones.”
Creation Museum, step aside! Welcome to 
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