Mike Hiltzik, an angry arch-leftist essayist for the Los Angeles Titanic, exhaustively analyzed last week’s Vergara v. California verdict on the way from his desk to the Titanic’s coat rack. He arrived at a deeply mined conclusion:
Only a modest 3 percent of students at my favorite Los Angeles high school – Crenshaw — can solve math problems at grade level because of:
Poverty.
Joblessness.
Racial discrimination.
Violence.
Wealthy people.
Unimaginatively, he writes, hopelessly, that there is no other explanation for the abysmal daily flopping of brown and black students in LAUSD schools.
Mr. Hiltzik’s recipe for guaranteed failure comprises the Ten Commandments found in every leftist catechism.
As a soldier of the left, he never tires of humming the same tune until the stomach turns.
He writes that those five crutches repose at the root of every perceived American ailment – gun control, uneven wages, climate change, ISIS, sexism, gay rights, gay wrongs.
Blessedly, his talent for rote explanations relieves the left of responsibility for fueling the mess or any motivation for curing it.
He holds the potentially correct answer in his hand, and just as quickly discards it as if it were discoloring his palm.
Ostensibly, the Hiltzik essay this morning was a post-game analysis of the teacher tenure court ruling.
Sadly, he refused to explore the possibility that bad teachers may be responsible for serial failure of public – as opposed to charter – schools.
A person of the left seldom agrees to engage, seemingly because he is incurious. Blithely, the standard leftist mockingly dismisses an opposing view as balderdash, an unworthy investment of his time and probing.
Finally, rich people are a staple straw man of Mr. Hiltzik’s creativity-starved twice-weekly essays, responsible for his favorite four core American ills. Because he is a man of the left, though, he bears no responsibility for explaining such twisted reasoning. An unsupported charge suffices.
The result is a bowl of unappetizing cholent.
