BOOK WORLD: We need better elites, Maddow said!

THURSDAY, JUNE 21, 2012

Our analysts laughed till they cried: Yesterday, we looked at Gail Collins’ new book. More specifically, we reviewed the four chapters which deal with the Texas schools.

At several points, Collins attempts to discuss, or pretends to discuss, Texas public school test scores.

For today, we’ll only say this: Good God! Also this: Inexcusable!

How do people like this stay employed? (They keep making jokes about Mitt Romney's dog.) At any rate, we’ll review Collins’ work next week. Last night, we were struck by the way Rachel Maddow described Chris Hayes’ new book.

Let’s give credit where it's due; Maddow is one of the genuine phonies. Here’s how she started her summary of Hayes’ book, which we look forward to reading:

MADDOW (6/20/12): The great Chris Hayes, who you know from this network, has a new book out that's called “Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy.” And in this new book, Chris makes the case that the people who are supposed to be good at stuff in our country are no longer good at stuff.

We’re sort of calcified in a way in this country, that we count on an elite to do everything. But for a very important reason, our elite [pause] sucks!

A few basic pointers:

First, when the children start introducing each other as “the great [insert name here],” a new elite is inventing itself—and you are getting hustled. As a general tendency, this new elite will “suck” just as badly as all the other ones did.

Beyond that, we were struck by the spectacle of Maddow complaining that “the people who are supposed to be good at stuff in our country are no longer good at stuff.” The previous night, she had basically lied in your faces, pretending that a pol she dislikes had done several things he just plain hadn’t done. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/20/12.

Maddow does this sort of thing rather frequently. Put it this way: The people who are supposed to be honest in our country are no longer honest.

As Maddow continued her account of Hayes’ book, we were struck by her list of elites. To watch this full segment, click here.

Maddow went on and on with her list. Can you see the one group she missed?

MADDOW (continuing directly): And it's kind of hard to argue with him on that. I mean, what elite institution is in good shape in our country if you judge by our recent history? If you judge by the first decade of the century, what Chris calls “the decade of fail”—well, it starts with the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, an institution that embodies an ideal of pure, dispassionate, elite cogitation, handed to the presidency to a favored choice of a slim, five-person majority in a ruling whose legal logic was so tortured the court itself announced it could not be used as precedent.

Then the American security apparatus, the largest in the world, failed to prevent 19 men with knives and box cutters from pulling off the greatest mass murder in U.S. history.

Just a few months later, Enron and Arthur Anderson imploded. At the time, Enron was the largest corporate bankruptcy in the history of the nation, what once was the hottest company in America was revealed to be an elaborate fraud, aided and abetted by one of the most trusted accounting firms in the entire world.

So that's how we started, then there was the Iraq war, and then there was Katrina and drowning of New Orleans, and then there was the collapse of Wall Street and the collapse of housing and the onset of the greatest depression since the Great Depression.

Quoting Chris, "The dysfunction revealed by the crisis decade extends even past the government and the Fortune 500. The Catholic Church was exposed for its systematic policy of protecting serial child rapists and enabling them to victimize children.

"Penn State University was forced to fire its believed football coach and university president, after it was revealed that much of the school's sports and administrative hierarchy have looked the other way while former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky allegedly raped and abused young boys on its own property.

"Even baseball, our own national pastime, came to be viewed as little more than a corrupt racket, as each week brought a new revelation of a star who is taking performance-enhancing drugs, while owners, players and union leadership colluded in a cover-up."

[...]

The novel and arresting thesis we are getting now from Chris Hayes in this really important book is that we need better elites, which means there has to be some room for there to be new ones, which is why this is a reason to be cheerful actually.

Sometimes quoting Hayes, Rachel mentioned all the elites, right down to Penn State and the national pastime. But did you notice one major elite she forgot to add to her list?

We look forward to reading Hayes’ book. Accordingto Maddow, he presents a novel thesis: We need better elites!

Who else would have thought of that? At any rate, as you read Hayes' book, stay clear on this point:

Hayes and Maddow know one elite better than any other. They know that elite from within.

Maddow makes millions of dollars each year from her role within that elite.

Last night, she forgot to mention that elite, the one to which she belongs. She also pretended that the scandal of Campaign 2000 began with the Supreme Court. That is your country’s recent history as told by careerist liberals. (The Clinton-Gore years didn’t happen. Fools For Scandal was never written. Chris Matthews and all the other heroes didn't wage that twenty-month war against Gore. There was nothing to look at whatsoever. Then, the Supreme Court misfired!)

Hayes knows one elite especially well. As we read his book, we plan to watch the way he handles the work of that group.

He knows that one elite quite well. Will he or that hustler discuss it?

Meanwhile, in search of some comic relief: “We need better elites,” Maddow said.

Our analysts laughed till they cried.