The GOP Thinks You're an Idiot!

To arms, citizens! Sarah Palin is coming!

From the mouths of babes--There was a charming letter from Sarah Burke in yesterday’s Boston Globe. Burke wondered how Sarah Palin could not know about Paul Revere’s ride, an event with which most elementary school students have familiarity. Burke remarked, “Paul Revere was letting the Minutemen know that the British were coming so they could get their guns. Revere was not letting the British know that the British were coming.” Sarah should know what’s taught in grade school; she’s nine. That’s Sarah Burke; Sarah Palin just acts like she’s nine, a talent she’s currently demonstrating on a cross-country freak show in which she insists she wasn’t wrong about Paul Revere, merely a victim of the “gotcha” media.

Sorry Sarah Palin--you were wrong. Paul Revere was not letting the British know, as she insisted, that they weren’t going to take our guns from us. She’s from Alaska and I’m sure that I could be stumped on an Alaska history question, but Paul Revere’s ride doesn’t exactly fall into the category of esoteric trivia; as Sarah Burke reminds us, it’s something that even nine-year-olds know. Sarah Burke probably has parents who told her it’s not nice to call people names. I forgot that lesson, so allow me: Sarah Palin is a first-class idiot. I’d laugh at her very existence save for one fact: she represents a political party that thinks it’s fine to be an idiot. The Republican Party cultivates morons and calls them office-ready. It banks on the hope that the electorate is dumber than nine-year-olds. The scariest part of all? The party might be right.

Think this is harsh? I wish I could dismiss Palin as an aberration, but the GOP also gave us Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, Christine O’Donnell, Scott Walker, and Paul LePage. To refresh your memory, they gave us--in chronological order of ignominy--the potatoe, weapons of mass destruction, the assertion that the U.S. Constitution does not call for separation of church and state, the belief that public employees shouldn’t have bargaining rights, and the claim that the first female Cabinet officer was a radical leftist. Put all of these subatomic brains together and you don’t crack triple digits on the IQ scale. When I look at today’s Republican Party I wonder if there has been this many dumb people in one place since free beer night at the lobotomy clinic.

Okay, I’m the kind of guy who thinks Bernie Sanders is too conservative, so granted I’m biased. I admit it. But does conservatism have to be so utterly stupid? Now that William Buckley has gone to the Big Tax Break in the Sky, who in the party--aside from George Will and David Brooks--could pass a urine test? Rick Santorum? Mike Huckabee? Michelle Bachman? Ron Paul? Not exactly Plotinus, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, are they?

If you are a conservative voter, aren’t you insulted that the party thinks you have the intelligence of a brain-damaged mollusk? If you continue voting for such pandering fools, maybe you do! Just for the record, I’m not saying that the Democrats are much better. If you go back to the IQ scale, they score dull normal at best. I’m not telling anyone to vote for Democrats, but here’s what I do advocate: If a political figure has less intellectual heft than a nine-year-old, tell them to shut up and get lost. Insist that whatever party you support fields candidates who use their brains for something more substantial than preening, parroting nostrums, spreading fear, and playing cavalier with facts. At the end of Sarah Burke’s letter she mockingly suggested that maybe she’s more qualified to be president than Sarah Palin. Given a choice between the two, Burke has my vote!