Well said. You’ve done Bismarck honor, probablya bit more honor than his crude remark deserves. Still, ou’re right about critical thinking.” It is certainly the most overused item of an entire glossary of content-free terms used today in with-it education circles.

I would avoid any suggestion, however, that its use is limited to liberals and other self-identified children of Enlightenment. At this moment, the heaviest users of truly content-free “critical thinking” and “critical analysis” language are creationists (hardly liberals) who keep trying, desperately, to get around the establishment clause. Having failed since 1925 to ban outright the teachinhg of (what they still insist on calling) “Darwinim,” next failed to justify equal time for something at first called “creation science’ and then “Intelligent Design Theory,” they now attempt (at this moment, hotly in Louisiana)to “improve” science education by demanding critical thinking on evolution (to be assisted, of course, by appropriate anti-evolution tracts).

As I keep remarking, the right has learned a great deal from the left these last thirty years.