Don't Diminish the Value of Education

Roger Cohen shares a "rags to riches" story:

Fazal Fazlin has an American story. Raised in Karachi, Pakistan, he came to the United States in 1969 with an engineering degree and little else. Now he lives on a five-acre estate in the waterfront mansion that once belonged to Nelson Poynter, luminary of the newspaper business.

This reminds me of when I was in law school, and a classmate from a well-off family shared that the carpet in his dorm room was from his parent's first apartment in the U.S., the one-room apartment where he had also spent his earliest years. I didn't know anything about his background, save for it being pretty obvious that his parents were now quite wealthy, and I asked, "You mean your parents started out here with nothing? He laughed, "Yeah, if you count their Ph.D.'s in the hard sciences as 'nothing'".

I Knew I Forgot Something....

Roger Cohen fills us in on his recent travel and shoulder-rubbing,

I dropped by the Élysée Palace to get a fix on things. The food was shockingly awful — tired crudités, desiccated hake, pasty potato purée — but the Château Batailley 2001 was a beauty. Seems President Nicolas Sarkozy’s too busy for solids.

I guess I forgot to enter "snacks with 'Sarko'"¹ on my travel calendar.... Maybe next time. Apparently Cohen sipped a bit too much of the wine, hence his conclusion for Obama:

My advice to him is: sobriety, sobriety, sobriety.

Is it just me, or is Cohen's editorial as lacking in substance as Sarkozy's described assortment of hors d'oeuvres for the foreign media?
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1. Yes, in his column, Cohen refers to President Sarkozy as "Sarko". I guess it shows that you're hip and cool?