Time: Joe Klein Dishes Palin and Her Ignorant Followers

Strangely enough, earlier today the boyfriend and I were talking about Sarah Palin and her birther minions and their overall lack of intelligence accurate facts and general stupidity and how democracy is dangerous when the general populace is ignorant and uninformed - something that concerned the Founding Fathers and resulted in a representative republic complete with the Electoral College. I come home and among the first articles I scan is one in Time Magazine that looks at the very phenomenon that we had been discussing. Sadly, far too many citizens do not know real history and easily fall prey to the Christianists who re-write history to support their theocratic agenda. Along the way, the Republican Party which once prided itself on intelligence and knowledge has increasingly become that party of morons and/or the ignorant. What I find so ironic is that Palin wears her ignorance and stupidity as a badge of honor. William F. Buckley must be rolling over in his grave. Here are some highlights from Joe Klein's biting column:
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And that's where I have a problem with Palin: what she said was drivel. No, let me amend that: it was anti-intellectual drivel. Obama is a bad Commander-in-Chief because he's a...law professor. No matter that this bad Commander-in-Chief has taken more concerted and aggressive action against Al Qaeda--more drones, more covert actions in Yemen and Somalia, more support for Pakistani military campaigns agains the Taliban, more troops for Afghanistan--than the baseball team owner who proceeded him in office. He's a law professor. He's a member of the elite. Which has come to be a term of opprobrium among the nitwit populists of the right--unquestioned, increasingly, by would-be conservative intellectuals like Bill Kristol and assorted Podhoretzs. I'm sure there's an aphorism somewhere--readers, please help--about the fate of great nations that celebrate ignorance and denigrate contemplative thought.
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Yesterday, a commenter asked if there was any form of populism that I could support. The answer is yes: democracy. But populism, as a movement, has a sorry history--it emanates from anger and often ignorance, and quickly devolves into bigotry and hatred.
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The right-wing populism of the past thirty years has been accompanied by a celebration of ignorance, a nativist anti-immigrant fury and, more recently, among some evangelicals, by the undue celebration of Israeli expansionism (as a prophetic prelude to the Rapture--which may have had something to do with flag pin Palin was wearing).
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This is a democracy; the more democratic it has become, the better. Anti-intellectualism is something else again, as is the celebration of some nonexistent "real" America, populated inevitably by melanin-deprived pickup truck owners. Those who celebrate Sarah Palin's lack of knowledge as a form of "authenticity" superior to Barack Obama's gloriously American mongrel ethnicity and self-made intellectuality are representatives of a long-standing American theme--the celebration of sameness, and mediocrity. . . . indeed, in the truest sense, it can be called anti-American.
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No wonder more thinking Republicans look at Palin and the teabaggers with dismay.