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Larry Summers or Larry Fine?
Rich Galen Wednesday January 19, 2005
The President of Harvard University is a guy named Larry Summers. One of the Three Stooges was named Larry Fine. No one would ever confuse the two. Larry Fine, turns out, was smarter.
The other day Larry Summers was giving a speech at a luncheon on the Harvard campus sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research. He said that one of the reasons there are few women at the top tiers of science and engineering is, according to a report in the Boston Globe, "women do not have the same 'innate ability' or 'natural ability' as men in some fields."
The President of HARVARD said this?
Whoa! Check, please!
According to the Globe, one of the women in the audience, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, got up and walked out on President Summers saying -
STOP. Swallow your coffee before reading on � Ready?
She said that if she hadn't left, "I would've either blacked out or thrown up."
In other words, she had to leave or suffer the vapors. How do you think that's playing over at the MIT faculty lounge this morning?
Don't you love it when the Liberals get into a misting contest?
As Ron Popeil likes to say, "But wait! There's more!" According to the Globe's reporting:
Summers also used as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral parenting. Yet she treated them almost like dolls, naming one of them ''daddy truck," and one ''baby truck."
Oh, yeah. I'm certain that little anecdote helped smooth the ruffled feathered boas in the crowd.
The Boston Globe, which must believe that everyone in its circulation area knows the background of all the major players in Eastern Mass, neglected to point out to its readers that Mr. Summers used to be Secretary of the Treasury.
With that kind of anti-NOW attitude, Summers must have worked for Nixon. Or Reagan. Or Hoover.
Nah. Clinton. He was Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton. Can you imagine?
I only raise this point because if Summers had worked for a Republican President, I am fairly certain the Boston Globe would have taken great pains to point that out and, by inference, suggested that President Bush probably agrees with him.
I don't know whether the reporter, Marcella Bombardieri, had that fact in and the editors took it out, but it seems passing strange that in this era where every utterance by every living person is viewed through a political lens, the Globe would have whiffed on that point.
Maybe someone's put something in the water in Boston. Also the other day, Senator John Kerry said at a breakfast honoring Dr. Martin Luther King that many voters were "suppressed" when they went to the polls in November.
"In Democratic districts, it took people four, five, 11 hours to vote, while Republicans [went] through in 10 minutes. Same voting machines, same process, our America," Kerry said.
Continuing his long and well-developed practice of re-writing history to suit his needs, Kerry said that there were "widespread reports of irregularities, questionable practices by some election officials, and instances of lawful voters being denied the right to vote" in the battleground state of Ohio.
Memo to Kerry. You lost Ohio by 119,000 votes. Quit trying to make it sound like it might have just barely been a tad more than the margin by which Bush beat Gore in Florida in 2000.
The only two people on the planet who still think Kerry had a chance to win Ohio are Kerry and Dan Rather.
Here's what I think should happen: Larry Summers should have Harvard pay for a study of female election workers in Ohio to see if, under the "Summers Theory of Gender Inadequacy," counting all those votes was just too, too much for the gals.
Maybe they're both onto something. Or both on something.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Links to the Boston Globe article and to bios of Larrys Fine and Summers. And a pretty good Catchy Caption of the Day.
--END --
Copyright © 2005 Richard A. Galen
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