Was he drunk? The Wisconsin State Journal’s conservative columnist Chris Rickert is the most ridiculous writer in the state, and that’s saying a lot considering all the mindless political stuff pouring out of the
MacIver Institute.
This is head slapping stuff too. Rickert, for whatever reason, was trying to defend one of the former candidates for UW president, Robert
L. King, (who is currently) president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education.
What spills out of Rickert’s nonsensical twisted logic are
some real gems:
King, an attorney, Lacking the Ph.D. would have been “problematic” for some faculty, according to UW-Madison professor Barry Orton “…university faculty whose professional lives are organized around the teaching and research that form the foundation for the granting of degrees have a strong bias for university leaders with earned degrees,” he told me.
Rickert’s response:
King’s lack of acceptably high levels of book-learning, along with the bit of Republican blood running through his veins, might not have been such bad things.
That’s right, who needs a degree to run a university?
But it's this candidates history with ALEC:
King’s stint on an (ALEC) American Legislative Exchange Council task force some 25 years ago, while a Republican New York state lawmaker, also set off alarm bells … a group that brings politicians and corporations together to craft conservative and corporate-friendly model bills and has become something of the root of all evil for certain people on the political left.
Who would think it's wrong for lobbyists crafting corporate
friendly bills by politicians representing people? You may have to sit down for this one:
Heck, with a crowd like the one in control at the Capitol these days, having ALEC on your resume may well be a feather in a prospective president’s mortarboard.
Which is not saying a lot about our current one party system. The only thing that made any sense at all was this comment:
Or as Senate President Mike Ellis put it in one outburst during the flap over the System’s financial reserves last year: “They all think they’re Ph.D.s and we ought to be working at Jiffy Lube. ... The Legislature’s a heck of a lot smarter than they’re giving us credit for.”
Not from what we've seen so far.
Rickert is absolutely the biggest idiot ever to write for a Madison newspaper and that includes Dave Blaska, which says a lot. I'm assuming he's married to the publisher's daughter or belongs to the same fundamentalist cult, otherwise I don't see why he has a job.
ReplyDeleteThe first time I read one of his columns --if you can call them that-- I was so astounded by the incomprehensibility, the incredible stupidity and lack of content that I was compelled to post a response to their online forum asking if the newspaper had ceased employing editors. For this they banned me. Not much punishment there I have to say.
Rickert is a tumor on the living body of journalism.
Gareth, whoever you are, your comment i spot on. Even considered within the not-so-proud journalistic history and tradition of WSJ, Rickert is the absolute worst. I'd be Okay with him were he a thoughtful, consistent conservative. In actuality he's just out to say what seems shocking or unusual, in what I think it an attempt to get as many online reads as possible. For some time now I've assumed that "Chris Rickert" is actually a computer program designed to take the most obtuse view of any issue and then create a meaningless, illogical argument in favor of that view.
ReplyDeleteOn the bright side, during the protests of a few years ago, it was his columns that cemented my decision to cancel my subscription.