5 Feet of Fury

Mark Steyn wearily explains whole ‘Dan Quayle/potato(e)’ myth to remaining idiot…

Who, not incidentally, sits on a school board.

Steyn:

C’mon, man, you’re a big-time educrat on a “Board of School Directors” and the best you can do is a Dan Quayle dig? With the benefit of your fine education, you’re not even up to a Charles Gates Dawes crack? Oh, and by the way, for future reference, the “Jo” of “Jo Biden” takes an “e” at the end – like “potatoe”.

Hey, you know what’s even funnier about that Dan Quayle guy? He’s so dumb he couldn’t even come up with his own misspelling! When he corrected the kid’s answer to “potatoe”, he was going from the flash card written out by the teacher.

You have to wonder what was going through Quayle’s head: Gee, that doesn’t look correct, but she’s a teacher and she must know the answers, right?

Like far too many politicians, he deferred to the wisdom of the professional educators – and it destroyed him.

That’s the real lesson of that incident – not that Dan Quayle can’t spell “potato” but that an American schoolteacher teaching spelling can’t.