The Great Ivy League Snob Off, Part II:
Keith Olbermann Is Also Embarrassing.
Ann Coulter’s spat with Keith Olbermann over Cornell bragging rights began the way all great battles of the mind do — Does this Rush Limbaugh make the GOP look fat? — and ends the way our comment boards do, a degenerative slinging of acceptance rates and SAT scores eventually boiling down to one guy pointing at his diploma and screaming about how smart he is.
Welcome back to the Great Ivy League Snob Off. Let’s meet the contestants:
In the first corner: Cornell grad and MSNBC gravitas junkie Keith Olbermann, who says conserva-pundit Rush Limbaugh is a know-nothing plebe who couldn’t tell the Constitution from his left foot. He’s so dumb, he flunked ballroom dance! (True story. Check his Wikipedia.)
In the second corner: Cornell grad and journeyman blowhard Ann Coulter, who jumps to Limbaugh’s defense with an astonishingly baffling 900-word diatribe about how Olbermann is not the “scary smart” messiah his fans think he is, but an Ivy League fraud:
Keith didn’t go to the Ivy League Cornell; he went to the Old MacDonald Cornell. … Keith went to an affiliated state college at Cornell, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (average SAT: about that of pulling guards at the University of South Carolina; acceptance rate: 1 of every 1 applicants).
Touché, Coulter. You hit us East Coast intelligentsia right where it hurts– the threat of farm dirt, and athletes! This is even worse than the time we realized Obama went to some weensy school in LA* before transferring to Columbia. Her opponent reeling, the skeletor in the right wing’s closet delivers a bony little knock-out punch:
Olbermann’s incessant lying about having an “Ivy League education” when he went to the non-Ivy League ag school at Cornell would be like a graduate of the Yale locksmithing school boasting about being a “Yale man.”
A metaphor involving blue collar labor? Low blow.
But wait! Olbermann’s still got some fight in him. After the jump: The response that may require us to banish Keither Olbermann from the Ivy League forever.
Olbermann rolls up his sleeves and starts punching in his daily “World’s Worst” segment, where he whips out his big, shiny diploma and morphs into a belligerently insecure teenager trying out for the debate team:
This induces an inward cringe so severe as to cause us to shed our external shells and molt. Most amazingly, Olbermann comes out of the diploma-brandishing and statistics-rattling segment with a persuasive argument against his status as an Ivy Leaguer:
In my four years as a student at Cornell and nearly 30 years as an alumnus I have never before heard one graduate of one of the university’s colleges belittling all its other colleges as not counting. We always considered each other equals.
Sir, the whole point of attending an Ivy League university is earning the right to belittle your peers. In fact, it is a time-honored Ivy League pursuit second only to incessant defensiveness and the perpetual need to justify one’s intellectual validit–
Oh. Right. Congrats, Keith. Looks like you’re back in.
* To find out about Obama’s life pre-Columbia, I visited Occidental’s Wikipedia page, where the gravest of my fears was confirmed.
