Damn Smart People, of Which I Am One!

AUTHOR: P. J. O'Rourke at The Weekly Standard

THESIS:  Obama and his ilk are irritating "A" student types

SEMI-SERIOUS SECONDARY THESIS: "A" students are what is wrong with America right now, and they're in charge

THINGS 'A' STUDENTS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR: "the syllabus for the Iraq war," the financial crisis, the tax code, health care reform ("just the kind of thing that would earn an A on a term paper from that twerp of a grad student who teaches Econ 101"), the disintegration of New York city into a place with "thousands of restaurant reviews and no place we can afford to eat"

WHAT IT TAKES TO BECOME AN 'A' STUDENT: "toad-eating"

A.K.A.: "apple-polishing"

EVIDENCE THAT AMERICA WAS INTENDED TO BE A LAND OF 'C' STUDENTS: The Mayflower, Woody Guthrie

FOR EXAMPLE:

The smart set stayed in fashionable Europe, where everything was nice and neat and people were clever about looking after their own interests and didn’t need to come to America. The Mayflower was full of C students. Their idea was that, given freedom, responsibility, rule of law and some elbow room, the average, the middling, and the mediocre could create the richest, most powerful country ever.

DETOUR #1: Actually, Obama is not a natural "A" student--he's a fake. O'Rourke suspects Obama wasn't that great at Occidental College and Columbia.

DETOUR #2: O'Rourke's daughter's friend is a "complete featherbrain who's besotted with Justin Bieber"

FINAL TWIST: "We're all A students now," because progressives screwed with the education system and introduced grade inflation.

TRUE SLANT'S MARK ADOMANIS'S RESPONSE: "Was P. J. O'Rourke ever funny?" And does he realize he's the "proud owner of a Master's degree form Johns Hopkins"? Minus a couple of GRE words and more pretentious punctuation, "this reads like rejected copy from The Dartmouth Review."

ALSO, ON THAT IRAQ WAR THING: "I have heard Donald Rumsfeld called an awful lot of things, but I have never heard him called an 'A student.'"