At times, the difference between national politics and high school politics becomes hard to differentiate.
For example, it’s become fashionable for conservatives to mock poor liberal performances on Celebrity Jeopardy. Chris Matthews and now Newsbusters is intrepidly exposing Thomas Friedman’s score. Noel Shepherd gloats:
Despite winning three Pulitzer Prizes, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman bombed on Jeopardy! Friday.
By the end of the show, he had amassed a pitiful $1,000 placing him third behind CNN’s Anderson Cooper and NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):
Which tells us either that Tom Friedman is an idiot or perhaps that the skillset required to win Jeopardy and the skillset to win three Pulitzer Prizes are quite different. Jeopardy has to do with the ability of contestants to recall large amounts of facts spread across general knowledge categories. It’s a tough game to compete in and requires more than native intelligence.
Those who appear as regular contestants on Jeopardy, bone up on all their knowledge, practice a lot with Jeopardy and other trivia computer games, study, and read. Doubtless the answer to many of the questions Friedman missed were stored in his internal memory bank, but was unable to recall under pressure.
If the moral of the story is that people should prepare a lot more before going on Celebrity Jeopardy, then that would be a good lesson. The games are often dumbed down and the lack of suitability of most celebrities to playing Jeopardy is painfully obvious. However, the more a sneering attack on Mr. Friedman and Matthews who were merely having some fun to support a charitable cause they cared about. What’s next? Attacking the scores at celebrity golf tournaments.
The number of pleasant things people can enjoy without the taint of politics leading to some fight is constantly dwindling and the reason are childish peevishness which we’ve seen on both sides of the aisle.
