Friday, April 12, 2019

Quote of the Day (George F. Will, on Herman Cain and the ‘GOP’s Descent Into Vaudeville’)


“The GOP’s descent into vaudeville began with the 2008 vice presidential nomination of Sarah Palin, it accelerated in 2011 when [Herman] Cain was taken seriously as a presidential candidate, and it reached warp speed with the party’s capture by the man who takes Cain seriously as a maker of monetary policy. Cain’s certitude about his economic nostrums is inversely proportional to the study he has invested in the subject, which probably has involved less effort than he recently invested in organizing a PAC to promote Trump’s reelection. Cain’s and his nominator’s boundless confidence in their economic beliefs demonstrates the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It is named for two Cornell psychologists who in 1999 described the bias by which the lower a person’s intellectual ability, the more the person tends to overestimate it.”— George F. Will, “The Cain and Moore Nominations Are Two More Tests for Republicans to Fail,” Washington Post, Apr. 10, 2019

(Photo of Herman Cain speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 11, 2011, taken by Gage Skidmore)

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