Anti-Climacus

LINK: Normally I try to avoid saying things which are more or less critical of Brendan (he being a fellow grad student and all), but this is, as Oz from Buffy would say, "a radical interpretation of the text":

"Fred Becker of Wonkette notes George W. Bush lording his office over Samuel W. Bodman, his PhD-holding Secretary of Energy, yesterday:


THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate the Secretary of Energy joining me today. He's a good man, he knows a lot about the subject, you'll be pleased to hear. I was teasing him -- he taught at MIT, and -- do you have a PhD?

SECRETARY BODMAN: Yes.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, a PhD. (Laughter.) Now I want you to pay careful attention to this -- he's the PhD, and I'm the C student, but notice who is the advisor and who is the President.


You think someone's a little insecure?"

Actually, I think someone's probably just trying to say something he thinks is funny (I am told this is sometimes referred to as a 'joke'*). I grant it may not actually be that funny (few politicians' jokes are, unless they're Bob Dole, who's hilarious), but the overall rhetorical device may actually have been to try and humanize the expert a little bit--not make him just a guy who's pronouncing from on high about policy matters (or whatever), but someone who's also a regular kind of person.

In any event, trying to read psychological motives into someone's statements has always struck me as a dubious move to make, whether they infer it from speakers on the left (inter alia, I don't think that Dick Durbin's comments on Gitmo were intended to be as radically corrosive as some on the right try to make them out to be--I think he spoke a little inaptly and so deserves some flak--but that hardly makes him an enemy of America) or from the right.

*I am aided somewhat in this supposition by the fact that the word '(laughter)' tends to appear in the transcript after each one of these statements.