The Having a Beer with the Idiot Factor: Bush, Biden, and Palin

One thing this election has really exposed, and to our national embarrassment, is our anti-intellectualism, and the nomination of Sarah Palin as VP is just the latest incarnation. Sadly, this has been going on for far longer.

Start off with the king of the anti-intellectuals, George W. Bush. He was elected because he was the guy everyone wanted to have a beer with. You know, I've drunk a lot of beers with a lot of guys, and there is no damned way I'd let most of them near the Oval Office. Yet that was the standard America used, and we got a president that didn't know what the major religious factions of the country he invaded was, can't say "nuclear", and thinks "These people want to kill us" is a sophisticated argument. Everything that followed was inevitable. It was just a matter of time.

Now along comes an intelligent, Harvard-educated black man to run for president, and some of the major attacks on him concern his supposed elitism. He's arrogant. He eats/drinks arugula (I confess to being insufficiently elitist to even know what that is). He's not like us.

Let's cut through the crap. What they really mean is that he's not a dumb fuck like us, he's not an idiot, he actually knows things. "Elitist" is just code language for "someone smarter than me", and in America that's bad, bad, bad. Only in America could a Harvard education work AGAINST you in an election. Only in America could the fact that you can draw far larger crowds than your opponent be used as a negative against you. It's ignorance, and it's envy, and it's fucking absurd. Who needs to watch Idiocracy when we are living in it?

So what does Obama do? He picks Biden as VP, who is also a smart guy. But he also speaks off the cuff, fumbles his words on occasion, and can say his share of stupid things. He called Obama "articulate" and "clean". In his nomination acceptance speech, he referred to Obama as "Barak Amer...". That no doubt played in his favor during the selection process, because it appeals to the dumb fuck vote. They say "Wow, he's like me", and that, in our bass-ackwards culture, translates into votes.

So now McCain has to counter, but we're on his turf baby. You can hear the voice in his head: "They're on my turf now, I can out stupid anyone". So what does he do? Nominate someone completely unqualified for the position, but who mirrors all the visions of "me" out there in dumbfuckland. They see the her hockey-momness as a positive, when it is clearly a negative when measured by the barometer of the demands of the position of vice president. Obama had no idea how right he was when he talked of this possibly being a big election about little ideas. Our two major parties are battling it out to see who can look dumbest. It is a national disgrace.