Grade Inflation

In the recently broadcast interview with Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama gave himself a grade of "a strong B+" for his first 11 months as President!  Ignoring the obvious arrogance of the Megalomaniac-in-Chief, it's frightening to realize that a person can delude himself into thinking that non-action is action.  Obama is a man that has accomplished little except to get himself elected President of the United States with smoke and mirrors and get a Nobel Prize for doing absolutely nothing.  It's also disconcerting to realize that this man wrote an autobiography before he had ever accomplished anything of note.

His second book, The Audacity of Hope, is a mirror into the soul of Obama.  Hope, it has been said is an excuse to do nothing.  And certainly Obama is well qualified on that account.  He does not speak particularly well unless he is tightly scripted by his handlers Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, the questions are pre-screened or planted, and when he has a teleprompter.  Although he was President of the Harvard Law Review and taught at the University of Chicago Law School, there is little or no evidence of any legal scholarship of note by Obama demonstrating what "thinking" Liberals  (NN: chortle, giggle, smirk) like to call intellectual curiousity and nuanced thinking.  His records from his birth certificate to school records have been sealed so that we know little about the 44th President of the United States,  except what is contained in his autobiography. Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose admitted as much during Rose's interview of Brokaw. 

It was said by some that John Roberts crafted his life to prepare for the vetting that he would receive when he became the nominee for Chief Justice.  But Roberts lived a life that can be verified by the public record and demonstrated a pattern of accomplishment from his youth to his appointment as a Supreme Court Justice.  Obama's life on the other hand is shrouded in mystery and avoidance.  In other words, our right to access about any facts about Obama has been converted to his right to let us know.  And this is where the grade inflation comes in.  Walter Williams writing in Capitalism Magazine, Fraud in Academia: Grade Inflation 101noted that,

Writing for the National Association of Scholars, Professor Thomas C. Reeves documents what is no less than academic fraud in his article "The Happy Classroom: Grade Inflation Works." From 1991 to 2007, in public institutions, the average grade point average (GPA) rose, on a four-point scale, from 2.93 to 3.11. In private schools, the average GPA climbed from 3.09 to 3.30. Put within a historical perspective, in the 1930s, the average GPA was 2.35 (about a C-plus); whereby now it's a B-plus.

Academic fraud is rife at many of the nation's most prestigious and costliest universities. At Brown University, two-thirds of all letter grades given are A's. At Harvard, 50 percent of all grades were either A or A- (up from 22 percent in 1966); 91 percent of seniors graduated with honors. The Boston Globe called Harvard's grading practices "the laughing stock of the Ivy League." Eighty percent of the grades given at the University of Illinois are A's and B's. Fifty percent of students at Columbia University are on the Dean's list. At Stanford University, where F grades used to be banned, only 6 percent of student grades were as low as a C.

In the law school that I attended in the late 1970s, the biggest complaint from students was that the grading scale was too severe. This "harder" grading scale resulted, it was alleged, in fewer job offers from the "top tier" law firms.  The school relented. It eased up a bit on the grading scale but worked hard to expand its legal programs and secure Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as a resident scholar for its "Originalist" program. In this sense subsequent law students got a value for value trade. The grade inflation was reasonable in this instance and my law school became a top tier law school.

Self-deception while not one of the traditional  Seven Deadly Sins does closely align itself with the sin of  "vainglory" or unjustified boasting.  Obama's self-awarded and inflated grade of "a strong B+" is the epitome of "unjustified boasting" to the nth degree.  Obama evidently ignored the unemployment numbers for November 2009 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Total unemployment stood at 10%, yet Obama who promised that unemployment would not exceed 8% if only we'd adopt his bailout plan thinks that he's done a cracker jack job as President.  Moreover, Obama has stolen the future of future generations by greatly increasing the National Debt. Instead of cutting waste and fraud in government programs like Medicare, Obama according to the Heritage Foundation:

... signed a "stimulus" bill that spends $800 billion, and he has proposed a budget that would:

• Increase spending by $1 trillion over the next decade;

• Include an additional $250 billion placeholder for another financial bailout;

• Likely lead to a 12 percent increase in discretion­ary spending;

• Permanently expand the federal government by nearly 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) over pre-recession levels;

• Raise taxes on all Americans by $1.4 trillion over the next decade;

• Raise taxes for 3.2 million taxpayers by an average of $300,000 over the next decade;

• Call for a pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) law despite offering a budget that would violate it by $3.4 trillion;

• Assume a rosy economic scenario that few econo­mists anticipate;

• Leave permanent deficits averaging $600 billion even after the economy recovers; and

• Double the publicly held national debt to over $15 trillion ($12.5 trillion after inflation).2

Before the recession, federal spending totaled $24,000 per U.S. household. President Obama would hike it to $32,000 per household by 2019— an inflation-adjusted $8,000-per-household expan­sion of government. Even the steep tax increases planned for all taxpayers would not finance all of this spending: The President's budget would add trillions of dollars in new debt.

Not even in the most liberal of economics classes would this Obamanomics nightmare pass muster if presented as a class project.  Most of the so-called shovel ready jobs won't be let until the eve of the 2010 Congressional elections. How convenient and how very, very Chicago politics.  But yet Obama believes that he has done such a good job to the point that his Chief Economic Advisor Larry Summers is saying (or whistling past the graveyard) that the Great Recession is over!  Doublethink is standard operating procedure in the Orwellian land of Obama.

Orwell's 1984 predictions were 25 years too early.  But not even a literary titan like Orwell could have imagined the oppressive obstinance of the Obama Administration.  The prevailing mental condition in the Obama Administration is apparently controlled insanity.  Einstein's definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  We know that socialized medicine (single payer) doesn't work (see the English National Health Service or the Canadian Medicare system).  But yet knowing this, Obama presses on.   Doublethink is the power to hold two contradictory beliefs  in one's mind simultaneously, and accept both of them.  Perhaps this is why Obama believes that he has done "B+" work. Nothing else explains his irrational actions except for a deep seated hatred of the United States.