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According to a recent article in American Thinker, there is a left-wing message that Americans in general—and conservatives in particular—are … well, dumb. And that Sarah Palin isn’t. And that Woody Allen is a political commentator to be taken seriously.
Stupidity is the face of American exceptionalism for Barack Obama and his media and university supporters. New York Times columnist David Brooks, a graduate of the elite University of Chicago, says the nation’s a “joke,” that Sarah Palin and ordinary Americans should shut up and let the “educated class” lead. Bill Maher, who practices his contempt at HBO and honed his arrogance at Yale, labels us a “stupid people.”
Meanwhile, Woody Allen says we are so clueless that Barack Obama needs to take his Harvard law degree in hand and become a “dictator for a few years.” Allen, who does not have an Ivy League degree, nevertheless burnished his elite cultural credentials with first an affair, and then a marriage to his stepdaughter a few years back. More recently, he dismissed the rape of a fourteen-year-old by fugitive director Roman Polanski with the observation “he’s an artist.”
Uh … it speaks volumes about your argument that you’re giving credence to Woody Allen’s word on politics. Is that the best example you can come up with, Stuart Schwartz of American Thinker?
They are angry that 81% of us put the nation “on the wrong track” and that two-thirds are “outraged” with what the “educated class” is doing to us. Their response, however, is pushback. The Atlantic magazine, a favorite of our political and media elites, just this month explained the growing anger on Main Street: “It’s that you’re stupid.”
Yeah, those numbers seemed a little funky to me, so I went to the link referenced by Schwartz’s article. It’s from an April 2008 CBS poll report essentially focusing on whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic candidate to go up against John McCain. Um, yeah …
At this point, American Thinker goes from being misleading to what I classify as too far. After implying that Senator John Kerry (“D-Martha’s Vineyard”) is “impatient with the average American’s failure to grasp the superior ways of elite Washington”, Schwartz continues:
“We’ve come back,” Kerry proclaims, proudly pointing to Wall Street, the economy, and the general state of the republic. The media applauded (with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, which warned that whatever Kerry was doing, he should “stop doing it in public”). If the poet Robert Browning (dead nineteenth-century white guy who originated political incorrectness when he gave up being an atheist and vegetarian and wrote soppy love poems to an individual of the opposite, not same, sex) had been a Washington Post editor, he would have gleefully slapped on the headline “Kerry Says Obama’s in His Heaven, All ’s right With the world!”
Blink. Oh, okay — when you’re married to the notoriously ill-tempered heir to the Heinz foods fortune, I suppose all days away from her seem sunny. Or perhaps all those years encased in tight spandex while windsurfing achieved what fellow aristocrat, Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy (D-OxyContin), did with drugs and alcohol: cut off the oxygen to his brain.
So yeah, it’s really classy to disrespect a woman for being married to a politician (and for being rich via ketchup) or an alcoholic/addict who has struggled publicly in the face of intense scrutiny every day of his life because of his last name. Neither Patrick Kennedy nor Teresa Heinz have anything to do with this. This makes you look pretty dumb, Mr. Schwartz … just saying.
And yeah, of course we had to get to Sarah Palin. You had to see it coming …
Sarah Palin is the anti-Harvard. She did not attend an elite university; doesn’t have a Kennedy, William F. Buckley, or Bush gene in her body; and offers cringe-worthy thoughts such as “I love my country” and that character counts. As such, she displays the “gleeful ignorance” that afflicts the vast majority of Americans disgusted at the mess our elites are making of the country.
The article goes on to insult everything from art critics to Harvard University. The point is, if you’re trying to send a message that America is “going elitist”, surely you could use facts and refrain from slinging shit just for the sheer pleasure of knowing it’s going to stick somewhere sooner or later.
Do you think you’re smarter than Stuart Schwartz? I sure as hell do.
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Are you kidding? The article is exactly correct, we are a nation of dummies (myself included). I am constantly bombarded with complete retardation, coming from people who are quite average in terms of intellect.
I’m not clear on your last statement, referring to being smarter than Stuart Schwartz. The author is communicating a sentiment among an elitist class which does exist (read up on the history of feminism to get a taste), how does being smarter than the author come to be relevent?
“The point is, if you’re trying to send a message that America is “going elitist”, surely you could use facts and refrain from slinging shit just for the sheer pleasure of knowing it’s going to stick somewhere sooner or later.” — Who is slinging shit?
Woody Allen is awesome.
Sarah Palin is a complete douche at best.
This is pretty irrelevant tothe larger point, but seriously? Woody Allen? Maybe he makes great movies (though haven’t seen any myself), but are you really going to argue that he isn’t a douche? Guy’s seriously messed up.
He has about 140,000 facebook friends. Isn’t that a fair measure of awesomeness in our society? I have no facebook friends, and I admit to complete idiocracy (which by the way is a great movie on this very topic).
Let’s not make douchery and awesomeness mutually exclusive, he can fall under both, however Sarah Palin is strictly douche. Fair enough?
I hope you are laughing right along with me.
I agree hmmm. except with the woody allen comment. anyway, we are a nation of apathetic automatons. we walk blindly to and from work, and from the fridge to the computer and comment on irrelevant strings.
we are told to question authority, than when we do, we are chastised for being unpatriotic. we are a nation of complainers who haven’t thought of a solution to our problems, and we tend to believe what we want to, ie Fox or msnbc. which ever fits our personal or situational political leaning.. our nation was founded by Europe’s elites and are still run by elites, who want to keep us ignorant and uninformed. this article and the subsequent “breakdown” of it just echoes that sentiment.
and yes Sarah Palin is a douche. she represents only those who can understand her gibberish
Meh.
Speak for yourself.
Try thinking for yourself, too – I do it all of the time.
well, i do(speak for myself), hence my opinion. and unless you are out and actually making a difference, you are part of the problem and just as guilty as the rest of the people and should just shut up, because you probably bitch and moan about taxes, the roads, the schools, the wars, but do nothing.
Commonality was supposed to be the dominant force in our lawmakers. Originally our congressman were to be average citizens who made law about 2 weeks twice a year,then go home and make a living. What we have now is a bunch professional politicians who don’t identify with the citizens. Wait till you see what cap and trade is going to do to American jobs. Another great article Katie,where do you find all these interesting subjects.
[...] It’s Woody Allen Vs. Barack Obama – Zelda Lily [...]
So…”gleeful ignorance” is a good thing? If so, I’m leaving earth and starting an elitist colony on the moon.
[...] American Thinker Claims Obama Controls the Media and Universities … [...]
On the one hand – okay, I’m a former MENSA member (only “former” because I just stopped paying dues). So I actually legitimately AM smarter than 98% of the population, by some scales. And yes, I have run into some…prize specimens out there.
On the other hand, though — I’m reminded of something a character in a Stephen King book was fond of saying — “Country ain’t dumb.” In other words, just because someone isn’t well-read and eloquent, or doesn’t know a certain skill set of facts, that doesn’t mean they’re unintelligent altogether. Often, some people who get dismissed as “stupid” are only “ignorant”, and even then, it’s only in a certain area.
Case in point — my mother, if she’d been asked the same questions about geopolitics that Sarah Palin was asked in Katie Couric’s interview, would have answered similarly. She don’t know much about that. But that’s only because of a lack of exposure; my mother certainly isn’t unintelligent. My mother just knows much, much more about other things — put her and me in a room with a baby, and MOM’s the one who ends up looking like a genius, while I look like a dithering fool.
I’ve always been uncomfortable about how easily people from “the elite” dismiss others as “stupid” when they’re really just ignorant. And we are all ignorant on certain topics. And ignorance can be corrected – you just need to figure out how to present them with that information. But tell them they’re “stupid”, and they won’t WANT to know — and that doesn’t do anyone any favors.
Stupid is as stupid does.
Let me think … The Stand? Stu Redman’s character? Just a guess, but that’s what I thought of initially.
I love when people try to defend themselves and sort of ah you know prove you right..