Wondering what to get as a graduation present this year? Consider “The Passage of Power” by Robert Caro, the new volume in his monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson. Its revelations of the cynical, fraudulent and vicious politics in Washington should counter the pious graduation speeches that young people hear about the nobility of “public service.”
* The new French president, a socialist, says frankly that he doesn’t like rich people, that “my real enemy is the world of finance” and apparently he has plans for much higher tax rates on high incomes. Has he not noticed how easy it is for the rich to move to some other country where the tax rates are lower — or to send their money there?
* When Harry Truman was president, he had a sign on his desk in the White House that said: “The buck stops here.” If Barack Obama had a sign on his desk, it would say: “The buck stops with Bush.”
* In most discussions of the problems of US public schools, the low intellectual quality of people who come out of our schools of education is the 800-pound gorilla that keeps getting ignored. Such teachers cannot give their students intellectual abilities that they themselves don’t have.