Really? There's a post I made in this thread earlier about a director of nursing who has much more education than I do who nearly killed a patient. She actually said, "Well I knew the BP but I had to choose between good BP or getting rid of chest pain."
And having a degree doesnt mean you're not an idiot. Barrack Obama and George W Bush both have degrees from Harvard. How many people think one or both of them are idiots?
Your arguments are simply fallacies. One case, even if true, does not disprove the case that a provider with a greater depth of knowledge is able to offer more to a patient than one who has a short technical course. Moreover, the fact that the Nursing Director you mentioned made a mistake does not mean that, in general, she isn't a better provider, whatever a "better" provider is in this argument. As we go on about time and time again in this forum, the plural of anecdote is not data.
Your second argument likewise fails to hold any water. While you may be right that a degree doesn't necessarily make you naturally smarter, it does make you more educated. And while some might disagree with the policies of either or both of the presidents you mentioned, I don't think it's fair to call either of them "stupid", despite the sort of polemics that one sees thrown about on cable news.
Anyway... the workforce in general is becoming increasingly more educated, and that's especially true in healthcare. A doctorate degree was necessary for me to practice my profession, and has been necessary for a generation or more (one can still find a few very old attorneys with an LL.B., but that degree was actually the same thing - a three-year post-graduate degree - it was just called a Bachelor of Law). Would you argue that because a paralegal and an attorney can both draft a complaint, they're the "same"? Are a CPA and the "guy who does your taxes" the same?
It's only in EMS that we maintain the fiction that being a technician is the same as, and just as good as, being a technologist (generally, the latter has a degree in the field, while the former went to trade school), on the rather tenuous basis that they can perform the same skills. There's more to it than being able to cannulate a vein or perform an intubation or an emergency thoracotamy (or any other skill you can name).
Now... as to whether nurses should take over EMS. I think the distinction here is that, for better or worse, what we consider to be EMS is a subset of medicine, not a subset of nursing. While the distinction is sometimes very grey, what EMS does is diagnose (whatever you like to call it) and treat (however imperfectly) acute medical emergencies to stablize the condtition until the patient can be delivered to definitive care. EMS does not generally develop nursing plans, provide for protracted care, or engage in wellness work or patient education. Those are key functions (or some of them) of nurses, which is what makes the two professions (or jobs, since I'm hard pressed to call EMS a profession at the moment) different. Even in the case of Nurse Practitioners, the focus is on traditional nursing areas - maintaining wellness, handling long-term care, and the like.
You'll notice, for example, that in those states that don't have a separate EMS licensing authority, paramedics are credentialed by the Board of Medical Examiners, rather than by the Board of Nursing. Indeed, the things that nurses have traditionally done very well are the things that EMS has traditionally done very poorly, if at all.
Even if you talk about changing the nature of EMS in part to allow EMS providers to be, in limited circumstances, definitive care, you're still talking about the practice of medicine, albiet in a very limited way, rather than the practice of nursing.
So, I think that the change in philosophy is significant enough that if you move nurses into EMS on a wholesale basis, you get some sort of hybrid that is no longer really a nurse. Better to enhance the skills and education of EMS providers to allow them to flourish in their selected role.
