Dumb stunt gets dumber

How many times over the years have we seen reporters ambush politicians with pop quizzes intended to generate guffaws over an inability to instantly recall the name of some third world country’s dictator? Now in this story from WFTV, Jeb Bush gets ambushed while advocating the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT):

"Me and a couple of my friends ... we know that the FCAT is a very important part of schooling in Florida and we were wondering if you could answer one of the questions we remember from the FCAT?" said Luana Marques, 18, who just graduated from Freedom High School in Orange County and is heading to Flagler College in the fall.

The luncheon crowd at an Orlando hotel, gathered to honor 200 students who take part in the Teen Trendsetters Reading Mentor program, laughed and Marques posed the question: "What are the angles on a three-four-five-triangle?"

The governor gave a steely grin and then stalled a bit. "The angles would be ... If I was going to guess ... Three-four-five. Three-four-five. I don't know, 125, 90 and whatever remains on 180?"

Marques had an answer, although it wasn't the right one: "It's 30-60-90."

My one concession: The governor’s guess was lousy. At least guess something that can add up to 180 degrees! But this Luana Marques woman is a bad joke, for at least three reasons:

(1) If you’re planning on throwing a “gotcha” moment at the governor, is it too much trouble to go and get the right answer in advance? I mean, obviously she has no intuitive feel for geometry, as she was utterly oblivious to the fact that her own answer was bogus (a thirty-sixty-ninety triangle’s hypotenuse is twice the length of the shortest side, with the remaining side root-three times the shortest).

(2) If you’re planning on sandbagging the governor into giving a wrong answer, shouldn’t you be asking a question that other people would think the governor should know? How many people are going to be indignant that Jeb Bush failed to answer that one of the angles was 53.1301023541559787031443874409065893424… degrees?

(3) This society doesn’t require a hell of a lot from its minors, and in many ways bends over backwards for them. Considering that vast fortunes are spent in efforts to educate them, and they are allocated the major part of 180 days a year or more in which to learn, is it such a horrific imposition to ask that some tangible, measurable result of actual learning take place? Luana seems to think so, and in an effort to demonstrate this merely shines the spotlight on her own ignorance.