Evolution in action

Watch closely, as Republicans mutate into Know-Nothings. Here's a guy, by the name of Mark Steyn, who likes to market himself as an intellectual. He pontificates regularly in print and in bytes, masquerading as a wise, smart, purveyor of Ideas.

And he posts here as follows:

I would rather be governed by the first 500* names in the Wasilla, AK phone book than by the editors of The Harvard Law Review.

Granted, he was quoting some other supposed intellectual of some stripe or other, but he associates himself with this Big Idea.

Do you get it? See, Barack Obama is a former EIC of the Harvard Law Review. And Sarah Palin is a person who might as well have been picked out at random from the Wasila, AK phone book. And obviously Sarah Palin would make a better President of the United States than Barack Obama.

I grew up in a town quite similar to Wasila, AK. Most of the people there are decent well-meaning sorts. But a random selection of them will result in a group of decent, well-meaning ignoramuses who have never traveled more than a hundred miles from their birthplace, have never attended a college, have never read an actual book, can't pick Iran out on a map, and think the science of Economics is some sort of Elitist Voodoo practiced by eggheads who might as well be space aliens. Oh, and they think the earth is 4,000 years old, that humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs, and aren't entirely convinced that the planet we live on is, uh, spherical.

We want these folks commanding our military, nominating people to run the Federal Reserve and be Supreme Court Justices, and performing day-to-day managerial duties over the gargantuan federal bureaucracy? Excuse my elitist small town Texas sensibilities... but that is Crazy with a capital "C". Pure idiocy. No one espousing such an opinion should ever be listened to about anything whatsoever.

I believe that people who read this here blog -- slip-shodishly run by a erstwhile small town Texas redneck -- understand what kind of ultra-rigorous criteria must be satisfied for someone to be admitted to Harvard Law School, much less to be installed as the editor-in-chief of its Law Review (only the most well-respected legal journal in existence). I guess people that read Mark Steyn's digital diarrhea either don't understand this or else believe that what we need, in this country, at this particular point in history, is a complete moron to run our country.

When your ideology has reached the point where its tenets compel the conclusion that it is better to have a neanderthal running the country than a smart competent knowledgeable person, perhaps your ideology is absolutely bankrupt without any conceivable possibility of redemption.