Today's GOP- The Stupid Party

I love Maureen Dowd when she's at her best and skillfully uses language to slice and dice the ignorant targets of her wrath. In today's New York Times she goes after the exaltation of ignorance and idiocy that now pass for serious discussion and intellectual substance in today's GOP as personified by among others Rick Perry. For newer readers, I grew up in a family of Republicans - Rockefeller Republicans, if you will, where logic, reason, intelligence and objective facts and authentic analysis were valued. It's a breed of Republicans that no longer exists. Instead we find ourselves either claim the title if "independents" or sometimes reluctantly saying that we are quasi-Democrats. It's not that we left the GOP, but rather that the GOP left us as it was hijacked by the cretins of the Christian Right who care nothing for objective facts and even less for rational thought and intellect. Here are some highlights from Dowd's column:

At the cusp of the 2012 race, we have a classic cultural collision between a skinny Eastern egghead lawyer who’s inept in Washington gunfights and a pistol-totin’, lethal-injectin’, square-shouldered cowboy who has no patience for book learnin’.

Rick Perry, from the West Texas town of Paint Creek, is no John Wayne, even though he has a ton of executions notched on his belt. But he wears a pair of cowboy boots with the legend “Liberty” stitched on one. (As in freedom, not Valance.) He plays up the effete-versus-mesquite stereotypes in his second-grade textbook of a manifesto, “Fed Up!”

Trashing Massachusetts, he writes: “They passed state-run health care, they have sanctioned gay marriage, and they elected Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Barney Frank repeatedly — even after actually knowing about them and what they believe! Texans, on the other hand, elect folks like me. You know the type, the kind of guy who goes jogging in the morning, packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow-point bullets, and shoots a coyote that is threatening his daughter’s dog.”

At a recent campaign event in South Carolina, Perry grinned, “I’m actually for gun control — use both hands.”
Traveling to Lynchburg, Va., to speak to students at Liberty University (as in Falwell, not Valance), Perry made light of his bad grades at Texas A&M.

Perry conceded that he “struggled” with college, and told the 13,000 young people in Lynchburg that in high school, he had graduated “in the top 10 of my graduating class — of 13.”

It’s enough to make you long for W.’s Gentleman’s C’s. At least he was a mediocre student at Yale. Even Newt Gingrich’s pseudo-intellectualism is a relief at this point.

Our education system is going to hell. Average SAT scores are falling, and America is slipping down the list of nations for college completion. And Rick Perry stands up with a smirk to talk to students about how you can get C’s, D’s and F’s and still run for president.

The Republicans are now the “How great is it to be stupid?” party. In perpetrating the idea that there’s no intellectual requirement for the office of the presidency, the right wing of the party offers a Farrelly Brothers “Dumb and Dumber” primary in which evolution is avant-garde.

Having grown up with a crush on William F. Buckley Jr. for his sesquipedalian facility, it’s hard for me to watch the right wing of the G.O.P. revel in anti-intellectualism and anti-science cant.

Sarah Palin, who got outraged at a “gotcha” question about what newspapers and magazines she read, is the mother of stupid conservatism. Another “Don’t Know Much About History” Tea Party heroine, Michele Bachmann, seems rather proud of not knowing anything, simply repeating nutty, inflammatory medical claims that somebody in the crowd tells her.

So we’re choosing between the overintellectualized professor and blockheads boasting about their vacuity? The occupational hazard of democracy is know-nothing voters. It shouldn’t be know-nothing candidates.

I shudder at the thought of where this nation is headed. Ignorance and stupidity are glorified in the GOP and meanwhile the rest of the developed world - and much of the developing world for that matter - are poised to leave the USA in the intellectual dust. Is anyone in the larger public paying attention? Or are the rank and file members of the public content with the prospect of the USA becoming little better than a third world country in not that many decades down the road? It is far past time that people woke the hell up.