A KIND OF GENIUS. Rightbloggers are such a malignant force that they ruin even such perfectly good ideas as they occasionally take up in their greasy mitts. Take the "Higher Education Bubble" stuff promoted by Ole Perfesser Instapundit and others. It's certainly a fine thing when young men and women prefer a career in the manual arts to a college education, and they stand a chance of prospering thus; I know a few carpenters who do alright.

But when kids pick up hammer or hod instead of a college application, it's not usually because they've taken a precocious interest in "soulcraft" -- it's usually because they can't afford to go to college. Like it or not, this has become a paper-pushing society, and the smart bet is on getting a degree. That's why people are preemptively bankrupting themselves to obtain them. Like much else in this country these days, it's a shit deal and a gamble either way.

I would like young folks to be more aware of the odds and better informed in their choices going in. But there I go, plain fellow that I am, reacting to real life, while rightbloggers push their psychopolitical meme: that higher education is a Marxist plot.

In "The College Scam," John Stossel starts by naming several famous people who never got a diploma. This is the sort of hooey with which normal people comfort a lad whose father has drunk up his college fund. Stossel, however, is not here to console, but to attack the educrats and Hitlery:

But today all kids are told: To succeed, you must go to college.

Hillary Clinton tells students: "Graduates from four-year colleges earn nearly twice as much as high school graduates, an estimated $1 million more."

We hear that from people who run colleges. And it's true. But it leaves out some important facts

That's why I say: For many people, college is a scam.

If anyone took this seriously, it would be close to journalistic malfeasance -- "for many people, college is a scam" is as true as "for many people, quitting smoking will not keep them from getting cancer," and as misleading. And get a load of Stossel's "important facts":

"People that go to college are different kind of people ... (more) disciplined ... smarter. They did better in high school."

They would have made more money even if they never went to college.

That's why so many Fortune 500 CEOs never had no book-larnin', and proudly display their high-school equivalency certificates instead of diplomas. Who's Stossel trying to kid? Answer: Fellow conservatarians who hate the professariat, those tenured radicals whose "research is often on obscure topics for journals nobody reads," like Wymyns Studies, amirite? Also Scary Obama, who "plans to increase the number of students getting Pell grants by 50 percent," the evil, dream-crushing bastard.

But what to do? Even Chris Christie is pimping Big College! "We need to wake people up," cries Stossel, leaping on the back of a truck like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and encountering piles of rolled-up diplomas (They're here already! You're next!).

Can't let Stossel go without noting this:

What puzzles is me is why the market doesn't punish colleges that don't serve their customers well.

Maybe the educrats are protected from Supermarket by Keynesian Kryptonite. I think the stuff Stossel uses on his hair has finally seeped through his skull.

Believe it or not, there's someone even worse -- oh wait, it's easy to believe, because it's Michael Walsh, working the pseudo-populist angle at the down-'n'-dirty National Review, founded by Butch Buckley:

But that’s not the way things work in Liberaland, a cargo cult that firmly believes in the totemic value of parchment — preferably, parchment with an Ivy League patrimony. That’s why self-made people like Sarah Palin, with her crummy journalism degree from Dogtooth State Teachers College, drive them crazy: Their only definition of “smart” has to do with school and GPA.

Well, Walsh does know from a kind of "smart" -- he managed to get paid for this suspender-snapping bullshit, didn't he? And in that sense we can give him and all his colleagues honors: it's increasingly difficult to get any kind of a job in this country, yet they've found a way to make money telling people that college is a trap.

Let's enjoy one more Walsh proof-point against Liberalanders:

By their lights, someone like Andrew Lloyd Webber, who dropped out of Oxford after one term in order to become a composer, is a complete failure.

These Liberalanders don't even like Cats -- how elitist can you get? To Walsh, America is an unhappily married mom singing "Memory" as she speeds off to one of her three fast-food jobs. At least she didn't have to study no semiotical whatchamacallit. Freedom!