Pretention

 In the midst of a global pandemic, and a large portion of the US population feeling and believing that an election has been stolen, I'm really enjoying the continuing coverage of Creepy Joe's wife, Jill, insisting that she be called "doctor."

For a large part of my adult life, I lived in a small college town.  We had our fair share of PhD folks who taught at the local college. The vast majority of those PhDs were fine people, highly educated in a narrow field and very conversant in that discipline, but they realized that they had broad swaths of human knowledge in which they were absolutely ignorant.  A small minority of them believed that the advanced degree gave them intellectual advantage over the rest of us.  Those folks we routinely referred to as "assholes".

The first group, those that realized their limitations, were a lot of fun to be around.   Educated, erudite, with a grand sense of humility and humor, they were simply sterling individuals.  That small minority of assholes were also fun to be around, simply because they were so easy to mock.  They made themselves a target of ridicule, and attracted the attention that they craved.  It was a lot of fun.

Thomas Sowell is faously quoted as having said; "The road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees."  I would amend that statement to read, "The road to mirth is paved with pretentious PhDs.  I might add EdDs to that list, but it is pretentious to put an EdD in the same category as a hard-science PhD.

When I moved to my current home, I left the college scene behind and began my second  law enforcement career, I worked in the school system as a Resource Cop. I ran into a goodly population of EdDs and learned that most of then were extremely easy to mock.  They'd come up with some grandious plan, a reinvention of some program that had been tried, and failed, and were mystified when it once again failed.  At that point, I'd ask, "Hey Doc, have you tried teaching them to read, write, and cipher?"  That would generally get a god laugh from the audience,.

I am convinced that EdDs and local politicians equally share in the failures of public education.

But, back to Dr. Jill.  She had made herself the center of attention in this public parody. We didn't bring it up, she did.  Steve Hayward, at Powerline, gives us a good synopsis.

The great thing about the “Dr. Jill Biden” issue is that it means the Bidens and the media will double down on this pathetic pretension and remind a large swath of the population the condescending elitism at the heart of liberalism today.

Go read the whole thing.