One wonders if Fred Barnes was really Morton Kondrake’s longtime companion.
BARNES: I think you can make the case that she’s one of those who has benefited from affirmative action over the years tremendously.
BENNETT: Yeah, well, maybe so. Did she get into Princeton on affirmative action, one wonders.
BARNES: One wonders.
BENNETT: Summa Cum Laude, I don’t think you get on affirmative action. I don’t know what her major was, but Summa Cum Laude’s a pretty big deal.
BARNES: I guess it is, but you know, there’s some schools and maybe Princeton’s not one of them, where if you don’t get Summa Cum Laude then or some kind of Cum Laude, you then, you’re a D+ student.
This is a perfect example of conservatives’ tortured relation with higher education. Everyone smart went to Princeton or some such, but even so, those schools are filled with A-giving pinkos.
Woodrowfan
So basically Fred is saying that since she’s not white, she couldn’t POSSIBLY have earned good grades on the basis of brains and hard work. And repuks wonder why we keeping calling them racists…
GambitRF
“One wonders.”
Yes, one complete dumbass named Fred Barnes wonders.
Napoleon
@Woodrowfan:
Yep, the underlying assumption to what he said is that Sonia could not possibly be smart enough to have done it herself because she is a PR.
Zandar
Asian and Indian descent, smart as a whip, hard workers, proved themselves.
African and Hispanic descent, only got there to due affirmative action.
Gotta love selective minority racism.
kid bitzer
this is so fucking ignorant that it hurts.
i hope that shirley tilghman comes down on him like a ton of bricks.
the basic shape of the ignorance is this:
yes, it is true that princeton graduates a small percentage of fairly dim bulbs, and that they are affirmative action cases.
except that “affirmative action” in this case is called “legacy”, and it means “white boys from old princeton families that donate a lot.”
old money families crank out dullards sometimes–just look at the bushes. nepotism breeds mediocrity–just look at the villagers.
but although the bottom of the graduating class can be unimpressive, there is absolutely *no truth* to the claim that summas are handed out like candy. this is just complete ignorance.
and strangely enough, this particular ignorance never showed its head when it was sam alito being considered. it’s only when a woman or a minority is under consideration that all of a sudden credentials don’t mean what they do for the white boys.
god i hate the villagers.
Michael
Ah, I remember all those “fair and balanced” Fox discussions. You’d have a panel that included Fred Barnes, Cal Thomas and 2 or 3 other right wing guys, and Mort was allegedly the countervoice.
Fred would talk about evil treasonous liberals who were deliberately destroying America while Mort disagreed, Mort’s position being that the liberals were destroying America by negligence, not design.
PaulW
I gotta ask where the f0ck did these morans get their college degrees? Oh, that’s right: half these bastards didn’t even finish F0CKING HIGH SCHOOL.
SGEW
More to the point, you don’t win the M. Taylor Pyne Honor Prize at Princeton, the “highest academic distinction conferred on an undergraduate,” based on affirmative action.
They give out two a year.
Michael
Fred inspires people to figure out how to track him just so they can punch him in the face repeatedly.
Jim
I just checked the website of my third-tier alma mater. 3.5/4.0. is the minimum for cum laude. I don’t suppose anyone is going to ask Fred where these schools are, or… is.
(So I’m not the only one whose gaydar was set off by Fred and Mort?)
Walker
She also got the Moses Taylor Pyne Prize, the highest general award given to an undergraduate at Princeton.
Barnes is assuming that because she is Latino, she could not possibly have made it though on her on merits. Despite the fact that her achievements have shown otherwise. This is a textbook example of racism, clear and simple.
EDIT: I see SGEW got here first.
Cat Lady
@SGEW:
[hands over ears] la la de la la la what can’t hear you la la la de la la la
/fred barnes
John D.
…
I love how these idiots muse about this, without bothering to check with, I don’t know, Princeton?
They awarded her the Pyne Prize — the HIGHEST academic honor for an undergraduate — in that same year. Sure her summa cum laude was a grade inflation result. Sure.
I’m gonna go with Fred Barnes is a fucking racist idiot. For $1000, Alex.
camchuck
Unless Sotomayor can’t answer “What books and magazines do you read?” without tripping on herself, the Republicans can STFU.
Da Bomb
I can recall several incidences where I was considered an “affirmative action” pick or that my white counterparts got accepted into a college based on hard work and merit. I always felt like I had to work harder to prove myself.
But no matter how hard I work, you have people like Barnes who completely discredit any accomplishment as a supposed “handout”. It disgusts and disappoints me.
MattF
This is just garden-variety bigotry. And they’re not really bothering to disguise it.
Little Dreamer
Barnes obviously doesn’t know what the Summa in Summa Cum Laude means. Here’s a hint Barnes, “there can be only one”.
Walker
By the way at most Ivies, Summa Cum Laude is engineered to account for grade inflation. At my alma mater (Dartmouth), summa was defined as the GPA threshold of 5% of the class from the previous year (or a minimal GPA floor of 3.85, whichever is higher). So it goes up as grades do.
SLKRR
Name one school like this, Fred. Just one.
What a racist piece of shit.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Shorter Fred Barnes:
“Romanes eunt domus – that’s Latin for Latinas go home.”
Tim H.
Dude, right now this is all performance art for the base. No actual elections, so they can be as crazy as they like.
SGEW
As a side note, I have to complain about something:
Where was all of my affirmative action preferential treatment, god damn it?! Yale and Harvard Law put me on their stupid waiting lists, despite my extremely interesting ethnic heritage, and I had to go to a demi-second tier school instead[1]. And I’ll still be neck deep in debt for the rest of my natural life – where are my preferential grants and scholarships solely for my “colorful” personal background?
Obviously, I simply am not “colorful” enough. If only I had grown up in the South Bronx in a housing project! Then it would have been pure easy street.
[1] First tier journal tho’, fer what that’s worth.
West of the Cascades
Besides being a totally racist piece of shit, he’s also wrong on the facts. I went to Princeton, was a solid B+ student (3.3), and didn’t get any honors (to get just “cum laude” you needed about a 3.5, and I wasn’t smart enough). Ignoring that she shared the Pyne Prize, which signifies precisely that she was one of the two most intelligent people to graduate from Princeton in her class, makes it clear that what’s motivating this is pure, unadulterated racism of a kind that we haven’t seen since, I guess, the debate over immigration reform.
Mnemosyne
@kid bitzer:
Sam Alito graduates respectably, but not cum laude, from Princeton and is an editor at the Yale Law Journal, which proves he’s amply qualified for the Supreme Court.
Sonia Sotomayor graduates summa cum laude, wins a major undergraduate award, and is also an editor at the Yale Law Journal, but she’s clearly unqualified.
Funny how that works, innit?
Brachiator
Maybe Princeton’s not one of them? Jesus H. Christ. These people can’t help themselves.
It’s amazing how these clods manage to suppress their racism when a nominee is Republican (e.g., Condi Rice or Alberto Gonzales), but they just can’t help themselves when a nomination is made by a Democrat.
InflatableCommenter
So our daily quest to find the dumbest-assed thing on the bandwidth for the day is over for Friday.
Good work.
jibeaux
Did Crittencritter just link to this post as a way to turn the snark from a completely different post into an Espantapajaros? (That would be a Latina scarecrow) I think he did.
cleek
@Jules Crittenden » Compelling BS Line:
looks like someone’s trolling for a link-back. or is there another reason Crittenden linked here with nothing more than a sentence fragment ?
jibeaux
While I’m on Crittencritter, is it kind of sad that the blog of an editor of a large newspaper gets fewer comments than my blog, which is about cute things that my kids do? I’m inclined to think so.
matoko_chan
Well ekshually this just proves neither Barnes or Bennett ever attended grad school.
A “C” in grad school is a fail.
jibeaux
Ah, and cleek astutely finds the missing link between my first and second comments.
anonevent
@Jules Crittenden » Compelling BS Line: (I’m not about to create an account on Jules’s website to respond) Engaging in straw man attacks won’t help – I don’t see anyone here complaining about state school – especially since I happen to be going to a state school to work on my PhD. In Doctorate parlance, Jules, go suck it.
Comrade Dread
Psst… Republicans… it’s rather hard to convince me we live in a post-racial world when you can look at a long list of impressive accomplishments that had to be earned and still write them off as a undeserved government handout.
Sarcastro
“Hell” he continued, “I got one of them elected President. Twice!”
John Cole
Just ignore him. He’s just trolling for a reaction.
Pasquinade
Bush and Yale
From what is known about Bush’s academic performance at Andover, it is doubtful that he would have been admitted to Yale unless his father (at the time a Texas businessman running for the U.S. Senate in a race he eventually lost) and grandfather (Prescott Bush, a former Republican U.S. senator who represented Connecticut from 1952 to 1962) had been Yalies
Other than being a legacy, Bush had no qualities that would have gotten him into Yale….he was a mediocre student — he never made the honor roll — and demonstrated no particularly outstanding talents to warrant being admitted to Yale. He was head cheerleader during his senior year, organized the school’s stickball league
It probably didn’t hurt that three of the seven members of Yale’s admissions committee who reviewed Bush’s application had been in Skull and Bones, the exclusive college club that also included W.’s grandfather and father among its members
Bush’s Yale transcript shows that he was a C student. He got particularly poor grades in political science and economics. In his freshman year — the only year for which The New Yorker obtained rankings — Bush was in the 21st percentile of his class. In other words, 79 percent of the students had better grades than he did.
It isn’t clear if the business school’s forms asked if applicants had ever been arrested. But if so, Bush’s application might have stood out — for the wrong reasons. He was not arrested for protesting for civil rights or against the Vietnam War. Rather, as a 20-year-old Yale junior, Bush was arrested for stealing a wreath from a New Haven hotel.
http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/01/dreier-p-01-27.html
jibeaux
@John Cole:
Maybe I could give him some pointers about generating interest in your blog. I mean, if I get more interest without trolling or blogwhoring, I must be doing something right, right?
Jules, if you don’t have kids or don’t have cute kids, I’d probably go the John Cole route and throw some puppies up there. People like puppies. Also kittens. Baby goats, even, are ridiculously cute. You could also make sure that all of your friends and immediate family are aware of your blog, and ask them to chime in sometimes. And don’t neglect the possibility of just buying a little publicity, there’s no shame in that. Ann Coulter advertises on this very blog all the time and I don’t think anyone would ever consider her shameful. You’re welcome!
cleek
and delicious too!
and now i lament the compassionate carnivore’s dilemma.
kay
@West of the Cascades:
I’m glad you brought up immigration reform; debate over.
Was I the only person in the country who noticed the huge mass of people who took to the streets for a peaceful march in opposition the last time Republicans tried the “bash all Hispanics” line as a political tactic, to rile up the base?
The numbers put the tea parties to shame.
Hispanics and others did that. They showed up. Masses of people. I can assume they can mobilize again, because that thing went off without a hitch. If I were a Republican, using sly language and mean-spirited slurs to rile up the dwindling base, I’d remember who showed up in numbers last time for this fight, and who didn’t, and how that worked out for them last time, in terms of elections.
I’d suggest they stick to the record, this time, rather than speculating on affirmative action, and who contributes what to this country.
Cris
Is it irresponsible to speculate? It would be irresponsible not to.
jibeaux
@cleek:
You would eat this little guy?
Cris
How do you fight such a savage? With heart, faith, and steel.
jibeaux
You would eat this little guy, cleek?
anonevent
@Cris: Let’s say she actually did get in on affirmative action. She’s exactly the type of result I would would hope to get out of it. Let’s compare her to the results generated when Bush 2 got in on patronage. It’s still a win for her side.
AhabTRuler
Now, there is no reason to drag Mickey Kaus into this.
eric
from TPM
Jefferson Morley explains how Judge Sotomayor helped puncture the Vince Foster conspiracy theory bubble.
you may recall my post from a few days ago about the Clintons and/or Marc Roth….I thought of adding Foster, but nope…..FTW! this will get gooooooooood
eric
Tattoosydney
@jibeaux:
Honestly – if Cole can put up four videos of his cat sitting on its arse doing bugger all, and still get 400 comments, and have us all on tenterhooks to see if video number five would involve any movement at all, how hard can this blogging crap be?
(Just joking John. Where’s the picture of my dog, dammit? Dog in a turban not Galt enough for you?)
Dave S.
@SGEW: Two prizes a year, eh? One wonders if one of them is affirmative-actiony. /barnes
It’s like they have this concept of parallel-universe Ivies. One wonders how much time they spend arguing over which one has the faculty with pointy beards.
Dennis-SGMM
@Cris:
Is it irresponsible to speculate that Bennett and Barnes dildo each other into a coma after every broadcast?
Martin
Ooh! A new potential conspiracy theory! I predict someone will claim that Sotomayor isn’t qualified for the court but is being nominated as payback for helping the Clintons clear up their Vince Foster problem, and that this was part of the deal for Hillary to support Obama.
Please, oh please, oh please can we get more Vince Foster conspiracy theories out there.
Damn, Eric beat me to it.
eric
@Martin: now on my wish list: Schiavo and ACORN. :)
Cris
@Dennis-SGMM: Peggy Noonan says no.
bago
To be fair, there was a group of Concerned Alumni of Princeton that fought the admission of any women into the Ivy League school.
So it’s unfair to tag this as personal sexism when it is really institutional.
Good thing such a regressive institution has no bearing on today’s Supreme Court.
Doh!
Dennis-SGMM
@Martin:
She was also the shooter on the grassy knoll.
SGEW
@eric: What about Bill Ayers?!
WHERE’S THE “GRINGO” TAPE?!?
Martin
@eric:
I don’t know. I’m now hoping this could be used to show that Obama had access all along to the expert forgers that made Vince Fosters ‘suicide note’ for use in forging his birth certificate. That seems a more productive angle, though it would be nice to get something new rather than more birther bullshit.
kay
@Martin:
There was a widely believed theory during the primary that HRC promised Rendell’s wife a spot on SCOTUS for his endorsement. The Pennsylvania delegates were sure of it. “Fast Eddy” and all that. The theory continued, post-primary: Obama promised the spot, in return for Rendell’s delivering Pennsylvania.
But Rendell’s wife isn’t the pick. So much for that.
eric
@SGEW: i think that me and lexis are going to be good friends this weekend lol
Xanthippas
Look, I went to freakin’ UT-Arlington and that wasn’t the case even there. I’d sure like to know what schools that moron is talking about.
eric
@kay: I still believe that Barack is gonna nominate for a seat on the Court.
really. no conspiracy. just think it is a great pick.
plus, the sideshow of the right going ballistic and fillibustering a former senator…my word…..but that will come after health care is passed.
eric
El Cid
Also, the “Nobel Prize” in Economics (Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences) is meaningless when Paul Krugman or Amartya Sen win it, but it’s a dignified award when it’s awarded to University of Chicago economists.
A highly trained and prestigious scientist is a true significant voice of national important when he writes in favor of religious belief on a personal level, but not when a highly trained scientist leading a major institution clearly outlines the role fossil fuel use plays in accelerating the rate of global warming.
kay
@eric:
I only entertain intra-Party conspiracy theories. I’m really willing to listen to anything anyone comes up with regarding machinations between Clinton and Rendell.
Republican conspiracy theories regarding Democrats are too ridiculous and crime-scene gory to follow, even for fun. They always go right to “MURDER!” For God’s sake. Get hysterical, why don’t you. It’s not even a good rumor.
SGEW
O/T (but Sotomayor related):
Bernard Harcourt at Balkinization utterly nails David Frum’s willful misrepresentation of Sotomayor’s background.
And Glenzilla’s on fire. On fire!
Man, I love the internet’s ability to nail liars. So satisfying.
Martin
Every school does it differently. Harvard awards latin honors to 50% of their graduating class. Most schools limit to 10%-15%.
To be honest, ivy league schools are notorious for padding their honor pools and their GPAs. That doesn’t deny the fact that Sonia graduated 2nd in her class, which is no small feat regardless of what honor was bestowed on her.
Cris
If there’s no conspiracy, how do you explain the mysterious disappearance of the nominee’s name from your sentence?
eric
@Martin: but her profs padded her grades because they could tell papers because of (1) the salsa stains and (2) she would call her papers “esses”.
I would rather be homeless than make money being a lying whore like Barnes.
eric
eric
@Cris: LOL….i dunno….it should be HRC
Balconesfault
Man, I got my BSE in Chem Engineering from Princeton with a 2.9 GPA just a few years after Sotomayor matriculated – I want my Cum Laude!
It might be the only thing to separate me from the legacy slackers who frat-boy their way through Ivy Schools (or in Princeton’s case, “Eating-club boy”. Really.)
binzinerator
Fucking Barnes. He needs to be slapped in the face with stinging nettles.
It won’t change his mind but a smarmy fuckstain like Barnes has earned it, with lots to spare.
This is what I absolutely fucking despise about conservatives. They got this resentment trip they love to ride. They’re so resentful a hispanic woman got something, anything.
And there they are, sitting around telling themselves a hispanic woman benefitted tremendously from affirmative action over the years, as if they themselves never reaped even more tremendous benefits over those same years for being white and male.
Ask one just one of these fuckers if they’d switch places — they will get all those so-called tremendous benefits and opportunites supposedly handed out for nothing to brown people and the brown people will get the same breaks white people have to make do with.
But you know none of these fuckers would ever switch. Because they know just how bad and how often they’d get shit on and shut out by assholes like themselves no matter how smart and capable they proved themselves to be. Deep down inside they know exactly who’s got the better deal.
kay
@eric:
I would bet HRC has zero interest in that job. It fits with nothing she has pursued previously. Her whole career has been policy, not law. I understand there’s an intersect, but I don’t see it, in her, at all.
She dropped “lawyer” fairly quickly. There’s nothing wrong with that, in her case it’s great, but that’s what she did.
She uses the degree, and the experience, but she shows no real interest in the sort of specific immersion that job requires.
I think she would hate it.
SGEW
@binzinerator:
“There ain’t a White man in this room who’d trade places with me… and I’m rich!” -Chris Rock
eric
@kay: I disagree. Contrary to her affiliations with the Mark Penns of the world, I think she is a believer in social justice, but has been circumscribed initially by her husband’s ambitions, and then her own. I do not think she will wait 7 more years to run for president and i think that her current job will be unsatisying fairly quickly.
I have never been a big fan of the Clintons and their third way bs, but i think that she is a forceful presence and her political abilities will allow her to put together coalitions on the Court.
Again, I am not an HRC fan per se, but she would be my first choice. I think all this talk about law profs and appellate court judges misses the point. There is nothing privileged about practicing law as a lawyer or a judge that gives you any special insight into the commerce clause and gun legislation.
eric
kid bitzer
@68–
“Ask one just one of these fuckers if they’d switch places”
cue chris rock.
Little Dreamer
@Pasquinade:
No shit!
kay
@eric:
Right. I think she’s a believer is social justice too. It wasn’t a slam at her. I think the supreme court is a really round about way to get to social justice. Crucial, but just one way.
The justices make the senators look like speed demons. It’s, um, plodding. And 95% of their cases are strictly legal, or even purely procedural, again, there’s a public policy intersect, but it can be really attenuated.
I think she’d be bored to tears, and, essentially, wasting a lot of her talents.
binzinerator
@Tim H.:
You mean they can be as racist as they really are. It’s not a stunt or a performance. It’s really a display of the motive core of conservatism without the usual attempts to conceal or spin it.
Balconesfault
@Zandar:
And they can, of course “can turn a television into a watch,” .
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
@Martin:
Yeah, he’s talking about Harvard. You’re basically in the lower half of your class if you don’t graduate with honors. ON the other hand, that’s the only school I can think of with latin honors policy like that.
Krista
It’s just phenomenal to watch these people twist themselves in knots. Is it that fucking impossible for them to acknowledge that a woman of Hispanic descent just might have sufficient brainpower to kick ass in school?
It’s absurd, and it’s obvious, and it’s so damn insulting. Like someone said upthread, were she Caucasian or even of Asian descent, I really don’t think you’d have this sputtering about how she couldn’t have POSSIBLY earned her accolades on her own merits.
They have no idea how blatantly obvious they’re making it that they think that people of Hispanic descent are stupid.
Rick Taylor
This is jaw dropping. We endured eight years of proud C-student Bush, along with lectures that was really important wasn’t book-smarts but being a regular guy and trusting one’s gut. We were informed that Sarah Palin was perfectly qualified to be in second in line for most important individual on the planet, based on her PTA experience and her state’s proximity to Russia, and now they really expect to be taken seriously when they say that Obama is a poor speaker who depends on his teleprompter, and a summa cum laude Princeton graduate Yale school law journal editor is stupid?
And this has nothing to do with race? They didn’t accuse Gore of stupid; an liberal egg-head elitist yes, but not stupid. They didn’t accuse Kerry of being stupid. They didn’t accuse either Bill or Hillary Clinton or John Edwards of being lacking in brains. But Obama or Sotomayor? Sure.
I resist explaining peoples behavior by saying their racist, but when they start calling summa cum laude Princeton graduate an affirmative action hire of questionable intelligence or ability, I find it difficult to draw any other conclusion.
While liberal, I’m not that sensitive to racial issues, and I avoid imputing to racism what can be explained by stupidity. So if I’m drawing these conclusions, I think Republicans are in trouble.
Trollhattan
Why is anybody allowed to appear on the teevee device with the author of “Rebel-in-Chief” without a mandatory five-minute stint of mockery, prior to letting him speak?
Even gamblin’ Bill has to know what a flyweight Barnes is.
bago
@bago: It’s too bad nobody actually follows links anymore.
Zuzu's Petals
I guess Barnes thinks Phi Beta Kappa (Sotomayor was an inductee) is also an affirmative action gig.
Dennis-SGMM
From the NYT, Nov, 2004:
Little Dreamer
Ummm, yeah – the only conclusion I can come to is that if you don’t own popcorn stock, you should look into it.
Richard Stanczak
Mr. Barnes and his ilk will never allow the facts to get in the way of their brilliant conclusions.
But really, doesn’t anyone ever publicly call these buffoons out on their idiocy?
Can Stewart or Colbert get this maroon on the air?
noncarborundum
@Little Dreamer:
Actually, no. Summa cum Laude just means “with highest praise”; there’s no implication that only one person can receive the highest praise. Also, in Latin the superlative is used for “very” as well as “most”, so Summa cum Laude could equally well be translated “with very high praise”.
Plus, if there’s only one Summa cum Laude, what does this do to Maxima cum Laude?
I’d wish you the best, but that would just cut everyone else out.
bago
Isn’t “highest” a singular? There can be only one highest, much like there can be only one tallest, and only one loudest.
Of course this is always subject to the amount of drugs you are on.
oh really
At Princeton, no one has to go to class, do homework, hand in papers, or take exams. Most people don’t know this, but Princeton is actually the worst university on the planet. Sotomayor would have gotten a much better education if she’d gone to a community college — and she could have saved a bundle.
The question is: Will Princeton University survive the nomination of Maria Sotomayor (sometimes referred to as Sonia) to the Supreme Court?
Both Bill Bennett and Fred Barnes agree — it seems unlikely.
Next installment: Just how bad IS Yale Law School?
Is it really worse than the the Simi Valley Night School of Cosmetology, Auto Mechanics, and Law?
Tune in, Bill and Fred will reveal the sad truth.
Ecks
Yeah, that fits with the observation of my buddy who was a grad student at Harvard and apparently was flat out banned from giving C’s to students who richly deserved it.
This same friend, now that I think about it, is a latina woman and got the prize for 2nd highest GPA at our undergrad college too (really, it’s true, she did)…. Heeeeey wait… I see the pattern now… Very suspicious. Latina women can be smart!
Wow, there’s a mind blower.
noncarborundum
@bago:
Not necessarily. It’s plural in a phrase like “the three highest grades on the test”.
This helps explain why “ten best dressed” lists typically contain more than one person.
Persia
@Xanthippas: Me too. I went to a state college, and I think you needed a 4.8 for a summa.
AhabTRuler
It is the praise that is the highest, not the recipient.
KRK
@bago: It’s been mentioned in previous threads.
Rick Taylor
Except for the white students of course. Students like George W Bush have to earn their C at ivy-league schools.
Mnemosyne
@oh really:
There was a troll at another blog I frequent who claimed that he knew that Princeton students were all stupid because the valedictorian at his Princeton-graduating son’s ceremony misspoke.
I told him he must have been pretty pissed to spend all that money and discover that his son could barely get a job at McDonald’s since everyone knows how crappy of a school Princeton is.
(Personally, I don’t buy into the Ivy League worship and there are plenty of extremely good schools that are equally as good as any Ivy, but trying to pretend that Princeton is the equivalent of, say, #1 party school University of Florida is patently ridiculous.)
noncarborundum
@Persia:
3.8, maybe? The scale only goes up to 4.
Zuzu's Petals
@jibeaux:
Well of course the Boston Herald is neither large, nor a real newspaper. It’s a wingnut tabloid that is justifiably (IMO) declining into oblivion.
But good point about the blogging thing.
Doctor Science
On the contrary, Sotomayor was actually admitted to Princeton under a restrictive quota system which explicitly limited the number of women who could get in, and which ensured that no man risked “losing his place” to a woman.
Samuel Alito, on the other hand, was part of an organization that wanted to make that quota even smaller, so that Princeton would keep its “identity” as a place for rich white men and a few hard-working scholarship boys (like Alito himself).
Martin
Well, for those that may not know, C’s are considered failing grades in graduate school which doesn’t undermine your point, but some people may not realize that.
But I have a joke about Harvard: The only thing harder than getting into Harvard is flunking out. They take grade inflation to amazing levels. Their general attitude is that every student deserves an ‘A’, because a ‘B’ Harvard student would still be better than an ‘A’ student anywhere else, so why weigh them down with grades that undermines their exceptionalness?
Martin
BTW, everyone needs to read Doctor Sciences linked post above, particularly someone who can highlight it on the front-page.
Ecks
No no, this is when she was being a TA for undergrads. She would be unable to assign less than an A to some pretty awful essays (though to be fair, the “awful” essays at Harvard tended to be smoothly written, because you don’t get in there without being able to write a slick essay, they would just be glib and totally devoid of any content that the course was supposed to be requiring).
Interestingly, her other observation was that the brightest students at Harvard weren’t any better than the brightest students at our good-but-non-Ivy undergrad school, Harvard just filtered out about the bottom third of the good-but-not-spectacular students we went to undergrad with.
jibeaux
@Zuzu’s Petals:
Ah. Am I thinking of the Globe, is that the big paper? I’m not from ’round those parts.
Little Dreamer
@bago:
Thank you bago, you got my point.
The highest praise is that the one at the top.
My point was not to say that others didn’t graduate Summa Cum Laude, but the highest (Summa) is the top of the list of honors.
Little Dreamer
Someone’s screwing with Ajax again.
“You are not allowed to edit this comment”.
Da Bomb
@SGEW:
Tell me about it. Where’s my affirmative action payout. I was also placed on Yale’s waiting list. I am ear deep in debt as well. I didn’t receive my “Black pell grant” or “we are giving you this scholarship, because you’re black!” money either.
Colette
From one of the commenter’s at Malkin’s blog, with no apparent sense of irony:
Excuse me, I have to go take a shower now.
MoXmas
The statement is the typical bullshit from Barnes, but I do know where that pipe is coming from. My Dad graduated from Harvard in the 60’s, and at the time, it was pretty common for anyone in the top half of the class to get “cum laude” honors.
Nothing to do with Summa Cum Laude, of course, though I’d bet Barnes doesn’t know the difference. So it was actually an example of him trying to sound like an insider, and not even doing that right.
gwangung
And if one were an honest pundit and not an intellectually bankrupt liar, you could do some simple research and find out.
One does wonder…
rikyrah
They are who we thought they were.
Plain and simple.
Keep ’em coming.
asiangrrlMN
I graduated from a decent liberal arts college Magna Cum Laude, and I was Phi Beta Kappa, too. Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination, and my school was not anywhere near Ivy League. I agree that it’s perhaps not as hard to stay in an Ivy League school than it is to get in, but this assertion by Barnes is ridiculous.
In the future, I would like to know the academic resumes of anyone who is deriding Sotomayor for not being very smart.
By the way, my school reserved something like twenty-five percent of its slots for legacy students, and more for males than females because we were short men. In addition, they minority rate was eight percent when I entered, and around eleven when I left. You tell me who the real affirmative action students were?
DougJ
This one goes to 11.
ronathan richardson
You know, I didn’t really think conservatives who hated affirmative action were racist, just small minded and selfish. I’ve been proven wrong. They think any minority who has succeeded is a racist idiot that guilty rich whites pulled out of the projects into an ivy league education and then prominent job. If I were a minority I would start shooting old white men this week.
bob h
If you got a Summa from a gut department at Princeton, say Spanish, it might not mean too much, but Sonia got hers in the History department, which is very big and very competitive. And the Pyne Prize is Princeton’s way of saying this is the very best student in the class of 800+ students, the very best product we have.