"Liberals wired for stupidity: Look at Cambridge’s dim bulbs"

Tuesday, Michael Graham of the Boston Herald had the best editorial I've read in a while:

Could it be that the problem with Cambridge is that liberals are just too darn smart?

I know liberals are smart because they constantly tell me so. Unlike, say, conservative Christians - described by the Washington Post as “poor, uneducated and easy to command” - Massachusetts liberals are brilliant, intellectual and competent.

Don’t believe it? Just ask them.

When a 2005 study found that 72 percent of professors at U.S. universities consider themselves “liberals,” some suggested an anti-conservative bias on campus.

Nonsense, replied liberals like Harvard professor Julie Reuben.

She told the Harvard Crimson that it was simply natural for the well-educated to lean to the left.

Harvard: Too Smart For Diversity!

But if you liberals are so smart, why do you do so many things that are so, well, dumb?

I’m not just talking about the big, embarrassing stuff like supporting the Soviet Union and getting modern economic policy entirely wrong. I mean the basics, like “Don’t pay the electrician $100,000 to change the light bulbs.”

As the Boston Herald reported yesterday, the city of Cambridge (“Gateway to Stalingrad”) has more than 180 government employees taking home $100,000 or more in tax dollars each year - including the $104,000 municipal electrician.

Overseeing this gaggle of overpaid government sycophants is a deputy city manager ($201,000 per year), a city manager ($245,000) and the highest-paid part-time mayor in America, Ken Reeves, at $92,000 plus a $40,000 annual travel budget.

Cambridge city government is just one set of $6,000 shower curtains away from the Tyco scandal, and they aren’t even embarrassed by it.

“We’re demanding livable wages and we made the decision to practice what we preach,” Cambridge City Councilor Anthony Galluccio told the Herald.

But $132,000 for a part-time job? Where is that a “livable” wage? Maybe in Dubai.

It’s the same in nearby Newton, where liberal politicians backed by a liberal electorate are building a new $154 million high school. That works out to a modest (or perhaps I should say “livable”) $81,053 per student.

Just a few miles north of Newton, it’s not uncommon for the knuckle-draggers in New Hampshire to build their high schools for one-tenth that price, those uneducated fools.

Why, those Granite State rubes probably shop at Wal-Mart and drink tap water, too!

Wal-Mart is, of course, corporate enemy number one for activist liberals, because it commits the sin of making life easier for poor people without punishing the rest of us.

As Jason Furman of New York University found, Wal-Mart saves low-income families more in food costs than the federal government provides each year in food stamps.

Their employees do all this for far less than $100,000 a year. Not surprisingly, Wal-Mart isn’t welcome in Cambridge.

And as for the tap water, well, you also don’t find a lot of people at Wal-Mart “smart” enough to pay $3 for something you can get out of your sink for free.

Fiji, Iceland Spring, Voss - you’ll find bottles of these premium H2O’s in the cup holders of Toyota hybrids rolling through Brookline and Beacon Hill, not next to the gun rack in a pick-up on the western Pike.

My father was far from Harvard educated, but he would have beaten me with a 2-by-4 if he caught me paying cash money for 16 ounces of filtered tap water.

“For six bucks, there better be somethin’ in here that’ll kill a fish!” he’d insist.

Then again, my redneck father wouldn’t pay Cambridge salaries or Newton construction prices, either.

Who would?

Only liberals, who are so brilliant, so intellectual, so incredibly well-educated that they’ve managed to outsmart everybody.

Including themselves.

HT: Uncle Bubba

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