Giving the lie to two big lies

Tell a lie boldly and often enough and the masses will believe it.

Take, for instance, the Big Lie that Ivy League schools award degrees only to the smartest people, human beings superior to the mediocrities who get degrees from state colleges or universities, places where ambitious children of the proletariat are groomed to manage, teach or tend the worker bees. Ivy League schools will admit some of these people, but their grades had better be off the charts, along with their SATs and their groveling letters of application, written so the bullshit isn’t detectable, a prized skill for those being prepared to assume places among the privileged elite.

Smart people graduate from Ivy League schools, of course, but hasn’t everyone noticed by now how many dunces and dullards get degrees from those places? George W. Bush holds degrees from Harvard and Yale, though his educational limitations were always obvious. (“Rarely is the question asked: Is our students learning?” President G.W. Bush, 2006).

None-too-bright Ivy League grads are sprinkled all over our nation’s capital, undermining confidence in our leaders and the schools that legitimate their ignorance.

Another Big Lie requires us to believe that New Yorkers are the cream of the crop in every profession.

But take Donald Trump. Please. Or Rudy Giuliani. If these two New York titans had started out in Oroville as sons of carpenters, neither of them would have been likely to achieve the status of assistant night manager at Burger King. Trump, graduate of Wharton School, dissed The New York Times by saying “They don’t write good.” Giuliani graduated from NYU and was dubbed “America’s Mayor” after running around New York with a bull horn on 9/11. Nonetheless, in 2016, he told fellow Republicans: “[B]efore Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful Islamic terrorist attack in the United States.”

Yes, indeedy, you’ve got to be pretty bright to be a New York hotshot.

Michael Avenatti, the attorney for Stormy Daniels, was born in Sacramento. Nonetheless, he’s obviously smarter and better educated than Trump and Giuliani combined.