Time Like Totally Explains the Constitution To You Wingnutz (and Commits 13 Factual Errors In Doing So)

I wrote about Time's embarrassing "Let us smartie-smarts explain the Constitution to you dum-dums" earlier. But I criticized it broadly, on basic misunderstanding of the document, focusing on the first four paragraphs, and I did so for three reasons:

1. I could see the basic broad-stroke error the writer was making in just the first four paragraphs.

2. Ummm... I only actually read the first four paragraphs.

3. Life is too short for stupid.

See, what I thought is that this guy was going to launch into the Standard Liberal Law Professor claim about a "living document." That's, what's the right word?, completely made up, but at least it was made up 30 years ago, so this bit of bullshit is at least graced by the decades.

How wrong I was.

Aaron Worthing did not stop there, and kept reading, discovered to his horror/to his humor (related emotions, those), that this guy, who was apparently the head of the National Constitution Center for a couple of years, knew practically nothing at all about the Constitution.

The more he read, the more flagrant errors he found. Not even the broad-strokes difference in idea about interpretation I went on about -- No, he found this "Richard Stengel" simply making errors, factual errors, about what the document says and the history of its writing, left and right.

Again: Not differences of opinion. Errors of fact.

Aaron Worthing collects up now these thirteen factual errors, and wants your help in securing a retraction/correction.

But Time can't retract. Their whole authority rests upon the claim that they are smarter than other people. If they retracted an entire article, by a credentialed head of the National Constitution Center, as entirely wrong in almost every claim it made, they'd look, what's the word?, pretty stupid and uneducated.

But you can still try.

Here's Richard Stengel, former head of the National Constitution Center, explaining federalism and limited powers of the federal government to you wingnuts.

No, I'm not making this up. This is the beginning of the Comedy of Errors/Social Horror of Ignorance.

If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so.

Interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

I'm not sure where you're goin' with this, but I sure want to join you on this crazy ride. Sounds excitin'.

Why Is The Media So Dumb? I don't know. I gotta tell ya, a lot of mediocre minds are attracted to it, because the mental effort for media-work is so low.

I actually exclude the creative side of the media from this -- they may be dumb, but top-flight talent on that side has crushed a huge, huge pile of competition to get where they've gotten to. Some of that is just sleeping with the right people, but most of it isn't.

But otherwise, the media is basically like (sorry to slam, gotta make this comparison) teachers, generally considered barely one of the learned professions, and, when named as one, really it's just people being nice and inclusive.

The media's the same. Not a lot of intellectual firepower decides to go into a job which mostly consists of asking questions and doing light stenography.

But who knows, maybe there's another reason. David Carr -- he of the Nazi phrenology references -- was a crack addict, for example.

posted by Ace at 02:56 PM

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