It couldn't be the fault of the conservative assault on general education requirements for those courses.  (The business sector wants all colleges to turn into vocational schools.)  

By this reasoning, maybe the thing to do is to penalize -- more handcuffs! more prisons! -- all students who got A's and B's in those courses but reward all those who flunked those courses . . . because the latter clearly were not inculcated in wrong thinking about the Federalist Papers, so those students must be the bright ones.  For being the Do-Nothings now.

And by that thinking, the best students are the ones who don't even buy the books (a more common excuse than you would imagine) -- and then flunk.

>>>>>Wull now, lemme see if I have this straight here:  A guy who is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution is warning us all of the dangers of higher education corrupting our politics?

Um...  Okay!  That just makes perfect sense in our political times.

For all his complaints about how little we know we all know about the Constitution, Pathetic Pete seems to have some serious omissions in his own education (or is that what we're supposed to aspire to in the Age of Palin?).  He doesn't seem to realize that the meaning of the Constitution and what it permits the government to do has been fought over from the beginning, starting with a debate between Washington and Hamilton versus Jefferson and Madison during the first presidency of the republic, over whether the Constitution allowed a federal bank.

Were they poorly educated about American history, too?  Er, should I more properly ask, Were they poorly aware of what was going on in their own lives?

Berkowitz writes that "the tea party movement has made its central goals abundantly clear. Activists and the sizeable swath of voters who sympathize with them want to reduce the massively ballooning national debt, cut runaway federal spending, keep taxes in check, reinvigorate the economy, and block the expansion of the state into citizens' lives".

Really?

Do they want to cut federal spending on their Social Security checks?

Their Medicare benefits?

Do they want to cut federal spending on the military?

Are they enraged at George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan for violating their deeply-held values?

When he talks about blocking the expansion of the state into citizens' lives, is he supporting Roe v. Wade?  Calling for the repeal of the Patriot Act?  Standing firm for gay marriage?

What the tea party possesses in idiotic hypocrisy is matched by its supporters' deceits.

Including those of brilliant academics.

...Or, um, are they?<<<<<

That every power vested in a government is in its nature sovereign, and includes, by force of the term, a right to employ all the means requisite and fairly applicable to the attainment of the ends of such power, and which are not precluded by restrictions and exceptions specified in the Constitution, or not immoral, or not contrary to the essential ends of political society.

Hamilton was not arguing for an unlimited federal government, nor was he suggesting that the federal government was sovereign in all things.  He was simply arguing that, as to those powers vested in the federal government, and those powers only, the federal government should be deemed sovereign.

Big government for me and small government for thee.