Here is a colorful rant against lawyers and law professors over the Wall Street Journal's suggestion that Harry Markopolos, who has written a best-selling book on his decade-long attempt to get the SEC to blow the whistle on Bernie Madoff’s billion-dollar Ponzi scheme, should be appointed chairman of the SEC:

Below are some choice snippets of an interview Mr. Markopolos gave the NY Times on March 1, 2010:

Are you saying the S.E.C. under Schapiro is about to catch fraud on Wall Street?
She has the wrong staff. They’re a bunch of idiots there.

What do you mean?
The five commissioners of the S.E.C. are securities lawyers. Securities lawyers never understand finance. They don’t have the math background. If you can’t do math and if you can’t take apart the investment products of the 21st century backward and forward and put them together in your sleep, you’ll never find the frauds on Wall Street.

So why doesn’t the S.E.C. hire finance people? Why don’t they hire you?
They’re overlawyered. They’re poisoned by lawyers.

Light this man a cigar! Bravo to Harry for correctly pointing out the major problem with most attorneys: they simply aren’t very bright.

Law, after all, is a degree of last resort: a dumping ground for obnoxious, insecure also-rans who lacked the creativity for art and the brainpower for higher mathematics and science. Long an academic “lifeboat” for drowning liberal-arts losers, it’s one today peppered with holes and sinking by the head. Harry’s spot-on about the bar’s total lack of math ability: most lawyers remove their underpants when required to count higher than twenty. Law was always a “short bus” industry, but now the Cooleys of the world are quickly reducing it to straitjacket status.

Any mouth-breather can drool on the LSAT, sleep through 3 years of Socratic time-wasting bullshit, and scribble some passable gibberish on the ole’ barzam. It’s essentially a standardless “profession.” As the old saw goes, the MCAT determines if one goes to med school, while the LSAT merely determines where one goes to law school. Just being a lawyer has of late become a joke in itself, now that the “Top 14” are getting a Taste of the Toilet.

With the above in mind, it was beyond arrogant for John Coffee, a Columbia Law securities “professor,” to condescendingly denigrate Mr. Markopolos’s qualifications to be the SEC’s next chairman in today’s Wall Street Journal:

He is what the commission needs only if the commission needs an emotionally unstable idiot savant,” said John Coffee, securities law professor at Columbia Law School. “You cannot be serious. He was right but that does not mean he will be right again.

We’re rendered speechless. For an arrogant, do-nothing slob law professor suckling the Stafford loan teat to criticize an independent, mathematical genius like Markopolos simply transcends hilarity. … You might as well ask Forrest Gump’s opinion on cold fusion as query an Ivy-league law professor about a topic that involves independent reasoning and complex mathematics (to say nothing of common sense). …[M]ost law professors enjoy more leisure time than the Maytag repairman, and have a slave-labor pool of sycophant research chimps on call in the lab 24/7. Their Bluebooks are sticky as a teenager’s porn.

(Hat Tip: Above the Law.)