If you ever chance upon a fisherman sitting on a stump or the rear bumper of his car and removing his waders, and you ask how he did, and he replies, “I pursued the trout,” it means he didn’t catch any. It’s usually said with a small, wry smile, but it has a vagueness about it that doesn’t invite further inquiry.
Rather like this:
She enjoys cooking and entertaining, needlepoint, and political activities. She attends Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie and is involved in various nonprofit organizations. Meeks pursued a B.A. in political science at the University of Minnesota. She also graduated from the American Campaign Academy in Washington, D.C. [italics are mine]
That’s from Meeks’ bio at the Metropolitan Council website. Because we know that graduated is in her lexicon, we may also infer that pursued means something else.
As in chased, but did not catch. As in went to college for a while, then quit.
There are a lot of great and successful people in the world without college degrees. That part doesn’t bother me much, although it is interesting that Meeks was the center of The Center of the American Experiment for quite a while, a conservative think tank inflated with academic pretense.
What does bother me is the coyness of the description, and the specific reference to a degree that she almost certainly does not possess.
Not “what you see is what you get'” as the Republican claque is claiming.
Joe Bodell has already written about the outfit she did graduate from, the American Campaign Academy. Essentially, it’s a Republican trade school teaching the plumbing and wiring of elections. Not only not an accredited college, it was stripped of its non-profit status because it was just a partisan cabal.
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