Think Tanks Face Closure

According to sources inside the nation’s growing think tank reform movement, junior and senior and even emeritus fellows at the vast system of brain trusts dotting the American landscape and consciousness are having trouble wrapping their brains around a startling new report issued by the almost forgotten National Association of Think Tank Accreditors.

Most perplexing to the nation’s best and brightest appears to be the Association’s strongly worded recommendation that 49 of the lowest performing think tanks be closed down immediately. Also reportedly striking the country’s intelligentsia dumb was the accreditors’ insistence that the governance of the remaining hundreds of America’s think tanks be taken over by an unelected public entity.

Said Dr. Condoleezza Rice, off the hook war criminal and senior fellow on public policy at the Hoover Institution, one of the think tanks slated for closure, “Please don’t tell me the sequester has left NATTA without ink pads for their rubber stamps. And didn’t we mothball those guys in the 90’s?

“And who’s the genius over there who thinks the best use of the nation’s best and brightest is to have us scratch our heads over how anyone could be so dumb as to question the wisdom of the nation’s best and brightest?”

The genius referred to by Senior Fellow Rice is Roger Dixon, newly promoted director of NATTA and former casualty in the reform war on the Washington, DC public school district, where he was a middle school civics teacher before being pink slipped.

Said Mr. Dixon, “In a new campaign we’re calling Race to the Light, we’re holding the feet of the nation’s illuminati to the fire of a higher standard of cogitation. For starters, we think it’s a no-brainer that an entity calling itself a think tank really ought to have the mental wherewithal to figure out it’s tanking in the thinking department.

“I mean, these professional brain cudgellers are performing so abysmally they don’t even know how abysmally they’re performing as they weigh in on the nation’s problems. We’re this close to revoking their right to even use the word ‘think’ in their title.

“Even we middle-of-the-pack thinkers on the government payroll can see they’re completely missing the story, which has never been simpler. My publicly educated seventh graders from back in the day could tell you that all we’ve done is reach another one of those ugly junctures in human history where the rich and powerful start ruining everything for everybody else.

“It’s not rocket science. It’s not even sudoku. The ruling class has gone bad once again and everything else is just pissing in the wind until they’re taken down all the notches they’ve been allowed to put between them and the rest of us.”

Said Lena Nguyen from the Division of Accountability Enforcement at NATTA, “When the think tank fellows up and down the political spectrum look at 30-plus years of money and power being madly redistributed upwards and come to the conclusion when America predictably goes to hell that it’s the folks on the lower end who need to pay the reckoning, it’s maybe time for some good old fashioned high stakes testing.

“If all these deep thinkers at Brookings and Cato and the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute want to hold on to their honorary thinking caps, let them prove they can tell up from down, left from right, torture from a hole in the ground, their ass from fascism, shit from Shinola maybe.

“Let them pass a simple true/false test like this one. When a capitalist society divides a nation’s public school students into haves and have-nots, it is the teachers and their unions that are the problem. When a capitalist society divides a nation’s public school students into haves and have-nots, the answer to the problem is to privatize the schools.

“Or this one. Blindness when it comes to justice means turning a blind eye to the injustice of the rich and powerful being above justice. The best kind of door between an unbelievably crime-prone financial industry and the agencies a nation’s people are counting on to regulate this industry is a revolving door.

“Or this one. It is moral for a nation’s fearless all-powerful leader to kill innocent people with drones. It is legal for a nation’s fearless all-powerful leader to kill innocent people with drones. It is wise military policy to have a nation’s fearless all-powerful leader kill innocent people with drones. It is good for a nation’s soul when its fearless all-powerful leader starts killing innocent people with drones.

“If true/false tests are too hard, we could ask questions like this one. If people who become obscenely wealthy and/or powerful largely by illegal and/or sociopathic means know they will not ever face justice, the chances they will correct their behavior are: great, good, pretty good, not so good, hardly good at all, not good at all.”