Today, my state of Michigan is holding its Republican presidential primary. Both frontrunners have gotten into hot water, Mitt Romney for making some silly comments that suggest he might be out of touch with regular Americans, and Rick Santorum for… well, for just being ridiculous.
Over this past weekend, in Troy, Michigan, to an audience full of fervent Republicans, Rick Santorum said:
President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob!
Wonderfully ridiculous… And he continued:
There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.
So, not only is President Obama a “snob” for wanting every American to go to college, there’s also some conspiracy of liberal college professors teaming up with the president to “remake” our young people in their image. It almost sounds like they’re trying to play God. And we all know politicians shouldn’t be doing that, unless they’re Republicans of course.
Here’s the best part. Rick Santorum went to college… and business school… and law school. That’s right. He is a BA/MBA/JD. That’s three more letters than Snob-ama. I have a new campaign slogan for Rick: “Irony You Can Believe In.”
It’s quite easy to understand why Rick Santorum might not want his followers to go to college. We all remember the study from last year telling us that a low IQ in childhood and adolescence leads to a prejudiced attitude as an adult (i.e., no marriage for gay people). The study also told us that low-intelligence adults gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies. This makes complete sense to me. Low intelligence beings tend to see everything in black and white. Many Republicans seem to fit this perfectly. But not to worry, they’re not alone. You know who else sees the world in black and white, through prejudiced, socially conservative lenses? The Taliban.
Rick Santorum is either actually stupid (yes, I know he has a law degree, but it’s from Penn State… the “snob” went to Harvard), or he’s playing into the dumbness of American society. We do tend to glorify dumbness way too much. We always talk about the dropout who started a successful company. Of course, for every CEO who was a dropout, there are a thousand CEOs who went to Harvard. And for every dropout who became a CEO, there are a million dropouts who became the night clerk at the drive-thru.
We live in a country where we have a game show called “Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?” And only two people have ever won the $1,000,000 grand prize. One was the superintendent of all public schools in Georgia (clearly an education-encouraging snob) and the other was a Nobel Prize winner in Physics (do I even need to talk about his snobbery?). In America, if you can prove you’re smarter than a 5th grader, you win $1,000,000. In Germany, you get to go to the 6th grade.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, American students rank 17th in the world. And that’s only out of the 34 countries that are in that organization. So Rick Santorum is getting his way. People in America are getting dumber. But I’d like to brag for a second. According to the Arab-American Institute, “89% of Arab Americans have a high school diploma. More than 45% have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 28% of Americans at large. 18% of Arab Americans have a post-graduate degree, which is nearly twice the American average (10%).” Some of us even have two post-graduate degrees and don’t even use them, becoming comedians instead. What I’m saying is that we’re smart, and we don’t like Rick Santorum.
Actually, now that I think about it, Rick Santorum has an abundance of degrees, is constantly angry, and believes in wild conspiracy theories. Maybe he’s been lying about the whole Irish-Italian thing… maybe he’s an Arab! No, no, I don’t want to start any rumors. Obviously, I’m being facetious. To all of Rick Santorum’s supporters who didn’t go to college and aren’t planning to, “facetious” means “humorous.” Oh, “humorous” means “funny.” I hope that helps.
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