Concerning LEADERS!!

SOME GOOD THOUGHTS BY THE WRITER MARK STEYN:

Who are these everybodies who know instinctively what's true and what isn't? The idea of a technocracy - a "central syndicate of gray matter" - is vital to Big Government's sense of itself. It's not about tired outmoded concepts of left or right, it's about "smart solutions" from smart guys starting with the president. "He's probably the smartest guy ever to become president;" said Michael Beschloss the day after Obama's election.

Really? Other than demonstrate a remarkably focused talent for selfpromotion, what has he ever done? Even as a legendary thinker, what original thought has he ever expressed in his entire life? And yet he's "probably the smartest guy ever to become president" says Beschloss - and he's a presidential historian so he should know, 'cause he's a smart guy,' too. Lending a hand, another smart guy, the New York Times' house conservative David Brooks, cooed over the credentialed-to-the-hilt smarts of the incoming administration: "If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we're screwed."

He's right. Over a quarter of Obama's political appointees had ties to Harvard; over 90 percent had "advanced degrees " And yet we're screwed anyway, with or without the Harvard-Yale game. If the smart guys are so smart, how come we're broke? How come those Americans who aren't tenured New York Times columnists or ex-legislators parlaying their Rolodexes into lucrative but undemanding "consultancies" or cozy "privatesector" sinecures as Executive Vice-President for Government Relations, are going to end their days significantly poorer? And how come those European social democracies that blazed the trail to Big Government are already poorer, and in several cases insolvent?

Unlike less sophisticated creeds, the statist ideology denies it's any such thing. Why, they're way beyond that: just as the political class are merely technocrats, so our educators are not leftist ideologues but impartial scholars, and the media establishment are objective reporters who would never dream of imposing their own biases even if they had any. Because, if you accept the idea that your worldview is merely that - a view - it implicitly acknowledges there are other views, against which yours should be tested. Far easier to pronounce your side of the table the objective truth, and therefore any opposing argument is not a disagreement about policy or philosophy or economics, but merely evidence of Nazism, racism, or mental retardation. Contemplating a hostile electorate on the eve of the 2010 election, John Kerry bemoaned the ignorance of the voters: "Truth and facts and science don't seem to weigh in," he sighed.

Senator Kerry is so wedded to "truth" and "facts" that, like his fellow Massachusetts patrician Ted Kennedy, he spent the Bush years disseminating a fake Thomas Jefferson quote ("Dissent is the highest form of patriotism"). Barack Obama is so smart he had a fake Martin Luther King quote sewn onto the Oval Office carpet ("The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice"). Barbra Streisand is so smart she sonorously declaimed to a Democratic Party national gala a fake Shakespeare quote she insisted was from Julius Caesar ("Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor... " - poor Will must have been having an off day. Hundreds of leftie websites are so smart that, after the 2011 shootings in Tucson, they all blamed it on Sarah Palin by using the same fake Sinclair Lewis quote from "It Can't Happen Here" ("When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross"), no, as it happens that's not in "It Can't Happen Here" or any other Sinclair Lewis novel.

But why quibble over the veracity of mere sentences? Liberals are so smart they teach a fake book in college (I, Rigoberta Menchu).

In a culture so convinced of its truth, facts, science, and smarts, even the Cliffs Notes are too much like hard work. As Shakespeare said to Sinclair Lewis at a Friars' Club roast for Thomas Jefferson, when conformity comes to America, it will be wrapped in torpor and bent in the arc of portentous banality.

The United States has not just a ruling class, but a ruling monoculture. Its "truth" and "facts" and "science" permeate not just government but the culture, the media, the institutions in which we educate our children, the language of public discourse, the very societal air we breathe. That's the problem, and just pulling the lever for a guy with an R after his name every other November isn't going to fix it. If Hollywood's liberal, if the newspapers are liberal, if the pop stars are liberal, if the grade schools are liberal, if the very language is liberal to the point where all the nice words have been co-opted as a painless liberal sedative, a Republican legislature isn't going to be a shining city on a hill so much as one of those atolls in the Maldives being incrementally swallowed by Al Gore's allegedly rising sea levels.

In such a world, the Conformicrats think of themselves as a meritocracy, a term coined by the sociologist Michael Young in 1958 for a satirical fantasy contemplating the state of Britain in the year 2032. And, as with "brains trust," a droll jest got taken up by humorless lefties for real. By the time Tony Blair started bandying the word ad nauseam as a description of the bright new talents running the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century, Lord Young felt obliged to object. Six decades earlier, he had written the party manifesto that swept the Labour Party to power in 1945, and he reminded the Blairite generation of two of the most powerful members of that government: Ernie Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, and Herbert Morrison, Lord President of the Council (and deputy prime minister).

Morrison had left school at fourteen and become an errand boy, Bevin at eleven to work as a farmhand. Against considerable odds, they rose to become two of the most powerful men in the land. There were no such figures in Tony Blair's "meritocratic" cabinet - nor in Barack Obama's. But there used to be, even in the Oval Office.

Yet today, whene'er such a person heaves on the horizon, the so-called meritocrats recoil in horror. Remember the early sneers at Sarah Palin? Not for her policy positions or her track record as governor but for her life, where she came from, where she went to, her frightful no-name schools: My dear, who goes to North Idaho College? Or Matanuska-Susitna College, wherever and whatever that is. "Celebrate diversity"? Well, yes, but good grief, there are limits.

Imagine what the new Condescendi would have made of candidates from Allegheny College (William McKinley, for one term), or, despite its name, Clinton Liberal Academy (Grover Cleveland, but he left to support his family). Why, Truman didn't even have a degree! And Van Buren left school at fourteen! And Lincoln only had eighteen months of formal education! And Zachary Taylor never went to school at all! Since the departure of Ronald Reagan (Eureka College, Illinois), America, for the first time in its history, has lived under continuous rule by Ivy League-less a two-party than a two-school system: Yale (Bush 1), Yale Law (Clinton), Harvard Business (Bush 11), Harvard Law (Obama). In an America ever less educated but ever more credentialed, who wants to take a flyer on autodidacts like Truman or Lincoln? And, even if you went to the right schools and got higher scores than John Kerry, as Bush Jr. did, the slightest departure from the assumptions of the conformocracy will earn you a zillion "SOMEWHERE IN TEXAS A VILLAGE IS MISSING ITS IDIOT" stickers.

Our new elite have more refined sensibilities than the old aristocracy: just as dowager duchesses would sniff that so-and-so was "in trade," so today's rulers have an antipathy to doers in general. How could Sarah Palin's executive experience running a state, a town, and a commercial fishing operation compare to all that experience Barack Obama had in sitting around thinking great thoughts?

In forming his war cabinet, Winston Churchill said that he didn't want to fill it up with "mere advisors at large with nothing to do but think and talk." But Obama sent the Oval Office bust of Sir Winston back to the British, and now we have government by men who've done nothing but "think and talk." There was less privatesector business experience in Obama's cabinet than in any administration going back a century.

If you sit around "thinking and talking," the humdrum responsibilities of government are bound to seem drearily earthbound. Hence, the political class' preference for ersatz crises, and the now routine phenomenon of leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it's President Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans or the Prince of Wales saying we only have ninety-six months left to save the planet. Time magazine ran a fawning cover story on Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, and Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of NewYork: "The NewAction Heroes." So what action were they taking? Why, Bloomberg was "opening a climate summit" and "talking about saving the planet." All of it, including the bits west of the Holland Tunnel. And Schwarzenegger was "talking about eliminating disease." All of them. "I look forward to curing all these terrible illnesses," he announced.

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And so the "action" guys" have acted by basically doing nothing for what they were going to act upon, the terrible illnesses are still with us, and Obama is still acting upon creating jobs.....the "thinkers" are still busy thinking about how they can think about thinking to change things, and when they have thought, the other guys in opposition think that thinking was wrong and think how they think it should be thought, and so the "thinking" continues.

And so in all of what Mark Steyn has said it boils down to why God in His prophetic word in the Bible says are "leaders are MAD" and then He goes on to say "our prophets PROFANE" (but that's another story, or you can get that story on my website, that shows the errors of thinking by Christian theology thinkers).