Clueless eggheads | The Salt Lake Tribune

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Washington Post conservative pundit George Will recently wrote a column about Utah 4th Congressional District Republican candidate Mia Love, who he said is "is black but not African American. She was born in Brooklyn in 1975 to Haitian immigrants." That's a fine distinction I've heard no one else make; after all, Love's ancestors were brought to the Americas to be slaves.

I guess Will doesn't want the Republican candidate to be tainted by the U.S. African-American culture that produced, say, Martin Luther King Jr. (As a daughter of foreigners, has Love produced her birth certificate?)

Will went on, describing the new 4th District as "created when the 2010 Census gave a fourth representative to this booming state — imagine Utah's growth if the federal government did not own 58 percent of the land." Actually it's hard to imagine enough population growth on federal land to produce more districts, but it's easy to imagine private cabin lots throughout our national forests (keeping out even hunters) and short-term strip mining destroying our long-term scenic assets.

When eastern egghead intellectuals like Will talk of the American West, they are just clueless.

Thomas Gibson

Salt Lake City