David McElroy

Some of the people who are obsessed with race in this country are insane. It seems polite to assume they’re insane, because if they’re not, they’re just idiots.

MSNBC’s Ed Schultz is one of those insane people. Or he’s an idiot. Take your pick.

Here’s the latest insanity from Schultz and others who see racism hiding under every phrase spoken by people they don’t like. In a discussion of rolling back Barack Obama’s health care reforms, Sen. Jim Demint, R-S.C., said, “If we are able to stop Obama on this [health care law], it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” Schultz repeated, “It will break him,” in an ominous tone and then accused Demint of being a racist for using the word “break” in relation to a black man.

Huh? Give me a break.

A couple of university professors support Schultz’s bizarro assertion. Dr. James Peterson, for instance, is director of “Africana studies” at Lehigh University, and he said that “break” is a racist verb, because it is “a term that was used to destroy, mentally and physically, slaves.”

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Right after World War II, a revolutionary group forced the Vietnamese emperor to resign and then declared Vietnam independent of French colonial rule. The emperor headed to the southern part of the country and established a new capital in Saigon, where he got his new government recognized by the U.S. and French governments.

In 1949, U.S. President Harry Truman ordered U.S. military advisors into the country to train the South Vietnamese forces in how to use American weapons. From that tiny detachment of advisors grew a war that killed more than 58,000 Americans, some of whom hadn’t even been born yet when the advisors were first sent.

I couldn’t help thinking about that as I read Friday about Barack Obama sending about 100 armed U.S. troops into Uganda to train government forces fighting rebels for a religious group calling itself the Lord’s Resistance Army. Will more Americans get sucked into a conflict that we know almost nothing about? I don’t know. The only thing I’m sure of is that there’s no reason for U.S. taxpayers to be paying for training another country’s army in a civil war.

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If you want to know just how out of touch the progressive left is about economics, you need look no further than two simple facts. First, the left is organizing and protesting to demands jobs. Second, U.S. companies are desperate to find workers who are worth hiring.

Do the protesters know this? Or have they bought into the delusion that they deserve to be handed jobs that let them do whatever they want to do, regardless of whether their skills provide value to anyone?

The problem is that American students are getting degrees, but they’re getting degrees in easier fields, so the choices they’re making mean they’re not competent for the jobs which are going unfilled in manufacturing. Someone who studied art history or theater is fairly useless to a company which needs an engineer or a skilled machine operator.

According to the Reuters story linked in the first paragraph:

“…American colleges are producing fewer math and science graduates as students favor social sciences, whose workload is perceived to be manageable, leading to a skills mismatch. Math, engineering, technology and computer science students accounted for about 11.1 percent of college graduates in 1980, according to government data. That share dropped to about 8.9 percent in 2009.”

If you’re about to get a degree, you might want to take a look at the 20 most useless degrees, in the economic sense. I studied journalism originally, which is the No. 1 most useless degree, and I happen to really like people who majored in some of the creative fields listed here. Honestly, I tend to find far more interesting about people with useless degrees than those with the useful ones, but that’s probably because I’m a bit weird. (OK, a lot weird.) So I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with studying obscure fields that don’t lead to high-paying jobs.

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