Why Republicans Embrace Simpletons and How it Hurts America

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Since I report on American education, including the intellectual lassitude of American voters, foreign observers routinely ask me: Why Do Republicans Gleefully Embrace Idiots as Presidential Candidates?

The question naturally begs a larger question: How can a country, with the world’s highest national GDP, and absurdly complex systems regulating everything from credit default swaps to nuclear missile safety, possibly allow onto its national stage men and women of such transparently inferior intellect?

The easy answer is that there has always been a long, pathetic history of anti-intellectual paranoia in American politics, as Richard Hofstadter documented in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963). It is like kudzu. You just can’t kill it. No matter how advanced the U.S. becomes in technology, biomedicine, and weaponry, it not only attracts, but promotes, under the rubric of equal opportunity, a confederacy of dunces as Presidential candidates.

"Intellectual" means anybody who doesn't fall for the Repug bullshit.

Ronald Reagan became the first of many morally unambiguous dimwits to warm the cockles of conservative hearts. [...]

Things are now so bad on the dumbass front that, in a poll announced yesterday, Iowans are no longer interested in the current crop of Republican cretins. This includes Texas Governor Rick “Oops” Perry, who, in a colossal boneheaded moment in a live nationally televised debate, could not remember the third federal agency he would cut as president.

And lets not forget the deeply annoying Rick "Sanctum" Santorum, who said publicly that former P.O.W. John McCain “didn’t understand advanced interrogation techniques.” A Republican dumbass hallmark: arrogance wed to ignorance (my em).

As a result of such transparently dumb stooges, Iowa Republicans, and conservatives in general, are actually settling on a bona fide shyster in the Richard Nixon mold: the pudgy, pompous, nastiness known as Newt Gingrich. [...]

Unfortunately, Romney, a Harvard graduate (and not a faux one like G.W. Bush), is just not seen as dumb enough. [...]

Plus he's from the Northeast. Plus he's a Saint. Plus he flip-flops like a champ. Plus plus plus...

Much more, but I think the author needs to come out of his shell and say what he really thinks without pulling his punches. Heh.