This morning, I was notified that Congressman Steven Horsford will be coming to campus to discuss how we can help African American students succeed academically. I find this to be a huge paradox, but that appears more and more to be the rule when it comes to politicians. Even as they decry some among them because they lack credentials, those who are the least accomplished among them sell themselves to us as the world’s foremost experts on everything.
Back in 2010, when Horsford announced his candidacy, I considered running against him because he seemed to be a very weak candidate to me. An early screenshot of his campaign website that I captured as a PDF shows that his own website is incoherent and illiterate. (screenshot coming soon) You would think that he would find someone to proofread his website before publishing to the world that he knows very little about English. Then there’s the fact that he is himself a college drop out. He might point out that his wife teaches at UNLV, but her work does not matter in this arena. She was not elected to office; he was. She is not at the meeting; he is. He is uniquely unqualified to talk about helping African Americans academically because that’s not what he did. It’s classical “do as I say, not as I do” hypocrisy.
However, this kind of hypocrisy runs rampant in Washington particularly among the Democrat party. What exactly are Obama’s credentials? We don’t actually know how well he did in school or if he finished law school because he never released his transcripts to say nothing of whether he ever passed the bar if he even took it. Yet, not only did he serve as a guest lecture at a prestigious law school, he also apparently knows more about health care, the economy, war, ad infinitum than any other person ever through all generations of time.
Democrats like to talk about how you can only talk about something if you have credentials. Yet, it didn’t stop a national reporter from claiming erroneously last night that police had positively identified Dorner’s body in the still smoldering ruins at Big Bear Lake. The police still have not confirmed or denied that. My own students ask me frequently why I don’t teach history or philosophy. I don’t have a degree in that. My degree is in Biochemistry. I have educated myself in those other subjects since leaving college. By their logic, Newton could not teach math or physics and neither could Einstein because they didn’t have degrees in that, Mendel could not teach Genetics because he was a monk, and Darwin could not talk of evolution since he attended school to be a parson and earned an “ordinary degree” after a Bachelor of Arts. That’s hardly first author material today. Yet, their experts like Bill Nye (Mechanical Engineering) or Al Gore (who has a BA with emphasis in TV and Political campaigns and dropped out of Law School to run for Congress) are held up as science experts without anything other than theories to back it up. Meanwhile, Conservatives are shouted into silence if they don’t have demonstrable 100% success records on the thing they propose to discuss.
As respects qualifications that’s just one way in which politicians are paradoxical. Too often they live one way and insist we live another. Too often they excuse in themselves behaviors for which they would roast us on the spit of public opinion. They are not gods. Like us, they too bleed. Like us, they too will die. Like us, they too must some day answer to truth, and the truth is that most of them are living a lie that will seem like hell when faced with truth before the Judgment Bar of the Great Jehovah. There we will find no hypocrites or deceit, only truth, and for those who have lived in truth, it will truly set us free.
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