Insty today hit a raw nerve:
TAXING THE RICH: The math just doesn’t work. But as we’ve seen, Obama and the dems seem deep in the grip of innumeracy — or, alternatively, they hope the voters are.
It goes further than just the 0bama administration. In the circles of “wordsmith” intellectuals, who live or die by their pen, articulateness is all too often confused with intelligence. When one engages some of these people (say, J’ism school grads) in discussion on nonverbal subjects — including totally apolitical ones — one often encounters astonishingly limited minds in the numerical (and, to a lesser extent visuospatial) realm. The word “innumeracy” is only a mild poetic exaggeration in many cases, and dead-on accurate in some others. A school and college system that increasingly allows pupils/students to avoid grappling with math and science only makes things worse.
Spin, strangeness, and charm 
[…] Neo-neocon attempts to answer this question. She argues that wordsmiths (that is, people who earn a living by pushing words around, suc as journalists, lawyers, most bureaucrats… all New Class professions) often tend to fall prey to the delusion that only words are real, and that anybody who speaks and writes well will be a good thinker or policy maker. In other words, wordsmiths tend to confuse articulateness and intelligence. […]