One of the things that I have been frustrated as hell to watch over the last two decades is the GOP attack on intelligence for political reasons.As someone who is a proud TK (teacher's kid), graduated from a gifted and talented high school and went on to college, I'm cognizant of and place high importance on education and my leaders being intelligent enough to handle the challenges of governing our country at the federal, state and local levels.
But one thing that has irritated me is this anti-intellectual strain that has been a cornerstone of the GOP rise to power over the last 20 years.
The Right Wing Noise Machine has convinced some Americans in their typical Orwellian way that being smart is bad and that being stupid qualifies you to occupy the highest office in the land. If anything, the last eight years have proven the folly of that pretzel logic.
George W. Bush brags about being a thank you lawdy C student at Yale. Sen. John McCain, who wishes to succeed him, graduated 894 out of 898 people in his 1958 Naval Academy class. Sarah Palin went to five colleges before getting her degree. Not only did she admit not knowing what the vice president does, she doesn't know much about geography, is ignorant about Supreme Court decisions, believes that dinosaurs walked the earth with humans and blames the 'liberal media' for making her look bad in her interviews.
And y'all want to know why our country and our economy is so jacked up?
That's why I'm ecstatic about having Barack Obama, a grad of Columbia, a summa cum laude graduate from Harvard Law and a constitutional law professor running for president. I'm looking forward to seeing an Obama administration chock full of the best and brightest people our country has produced working to solve our nation's problems that have been allowed to fester and have gotten worse under GOP misleadership.
I'm looking forward to having a reality based foreign policy, reality-based information and reality based scientific research coming out of government agencies not dominated by neo-Luddites or GOP Know-Nothings.
If the last eight years have proven anything, it's that the 'there's no difference between the two parties' red herring has been thoroughly debunked. It has proven the value of having people in governmental positions based on knowledge and merit, not loyalty.
As the old saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. As a superpower, we should have been focusing more attention when it comes to electing a president about how smart they are, not whether we can drink a beer with them. Frankly, instead of trashing people who run for public office, we need to go back to the old school way of defining it as the highest, most honorable calling for public service. Perhaps if we started paying more attention to peeps records instead of how telegenic they look, who ran the most negative campaign commercials or other superficial BS, then we'll get more intelligent folks to consider running for office
It's past time that we started encouraging our best and brightest people to get involved in government service. We need the 'A' students to start running thangs in the United States once again instead of people like the McPalin's of the world who are stuck on stupid.
