Friday, February 24

Grade Inflation

Can anyone, in fact, confirm that Young Ben Shapiro is a 2L at Harvard? I mentioned somewhere recently that his Constitutional d'oh-pinions still seem to come from a home schooler's History textbook. Thursday he pens the obligatory Larry Summers Got Screwed by the Leftist Academic Establishment piece, and there's nothing in the thing that couldn't have been written eighteen months ago by someone gleaning a newspaper on the opposite coast. Hey, Ben, he's the president of your university. You don't have a single anecdote about him that hasn't already been in Time?

The kicker is that Summers' departure was occasioned by his forcing out the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences so he could replace him with his own man. The faculty wanted a showdown, but in reality it was the Harvard Corporation that no longer supported him. I grant you that Townhall's readers have no interest in accuracy, let alone complex explanations to life's little differences of opinion, and no doubt Benji knows his audience. But sheesh, kiddo, unless you're planning to become Attorney General after you graduate, you're gonna have to deal with somebody's else's version of the facts someday. Now might be a good time to get in some much-needed practice.

And, Ben? The precocious fifteen-year-old routine may have worked well when you were, well, fifteen, but it's over, son. No one is impressed anymore that Mumsy and Pater drilled you with those Bill Buckley vocabulary flashcards. "Increasingly egregious resume"? That sentence wasn't going to work even if you had managed to get the pronoun to agree in number with the antecedent.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love the glancing, yet devastating, summation of Alberto Gonzales' patheticness in paragraph 2.

As for Ben Shapiro and Harvard Law, I lost most of my respect for Harvard grad schools with W's MBA. I think Ben's preparation for a career in punditry is probably a good move, since passing the bar may not be so easy for him.

Anonymous said...

R.I.P? "Falls on his sword"? Jeez, could The Virgin Ben be any more melodramatic? After all, Summers is hardly being thrown to the lions. He's taking a year's sabbatical, and THEN returning to Harvard as tenured faculty.
Not a bad life.

Anonymous said...

THANK YOU jp. It's not like Summers got killed or anything, and he'll get along just fine. What happened is, well, what happens at any job. You run your mouth and irritate your coworkers, and you're likely to get fired.

Anonymous said...

Interesting all the talk of ROTC at Harvard in Ben's little shitpiece. Wonder if he's considering joining up.

I thought his previous column was more typical of the gutless neo-fascist twerp.

Anonymous said...

"That sentence wasn't going to work even if you had managed to get the pronoun to agree in number with the antecedent."

This is why you are the internet god of snark.

TravisG said...

I can't prove Young Ben attends Harvard, but someone from the Harvard ISP performs a Technorati search whenever I shorten one of his columns. Who knows, though; maybe he just hangs out at the library all day and uses their free Internet.

TravisG said...

To clarify: that would be a Technorati search for "ben shaprio." (Actually, a surprising number of those Townhall second-stringers do that. Sorta sad, I think.)