Look, it is a wingnut named Walter Williams, talky-talking at ClownHall, about how smart people like Barack Obama are bad and stupid people like Sarah Palin are good!
There are a lot of things, large and small, that irk me. One of them is our tendency to evaluate a presidential candidate based on his intelligence or academic credentials. When Obama threw his hat in the ring, people thought he was articulate and smart and hailed his intellectual credentials. Just recently, when Newt Gingrich announced his candidacy, people hailed his intellectual credentials and smartness as well.
By contrast, the intellectual elite and mainstream media people see Sarah Palin as stupid, a loose cannon and not to be trusted with our nuclear arsenal. There was another presidential candidate who was also held to be stupid and not to be trusted with our nuclear arsenal who ultimately became president — Ronald Reagan. I don’t put much stock into whether a political leader is smart or not because, as George Orwell explained, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”
All the evidence that I see is that academics and intellectuals have messed up the world. I challenge anyone to show me a major calamity that was engineered by a stupid, inarticulate person
George W. Bush. Iraq and the entire American response to 9/11. DONE!
Goodbye, dumb wingnut.
It is sad that he wrote so many more words after that, as he could have been working on his times tables.
This is Jim Garlow, who Jeremy points out was a big mover and shaker in the Prop 8 fight. He spoke at Ralph Reed’s [more on Ralph later today, by the way] “Faith and Freedom Conference” on Friday, and said the following insane thing:
Yeah, those are the same. One involves a child’s parent being burned to death in a terrorist attack, the other involves children with two loving parents who have genitals that don’t conform to Jim Garlow’s sense of compatibility.
Liberal talking heads often suggest that opposition to the mosque at Ground Zero is just thinly veiled bigotry. They contend that the opponents of the mosque would oppose the construction of a mosque anywhere, and ask rhetorically, “How large should the mosque-free buffer zone around Ground Zero be?”
I’ve thought about that question, and here’s my suggested compromise: Back up the mosque one yard for every life that was lost at Ground Zero on 9/11. Three thousand lives lost equals three thousand yards away. If the organizers of the Ground Zero mosque would accept that compromise, the controversy would be over.
Does Gary Bauer have no one in his life who is willing or able to say the simple words, “Shut up. You are adding nothing to the national discourse. Go get a real job”?
Kyle at Right Wing Watch did the Liberal Math and determined that Gary Bauer’s Mosque Buffer Zone would be 1.7 miles around.
Somehow I have a feeling that if eight mosques were planned at equidistant points 1.8 miles around Ground Zero, Gary Bauer and the rest of them would find a new reason to run their wordholes against it, because for them, it’s not about principles, but rather about thoughtless knee-jerk bigotry and racism.
Without further ado, and inspired by the hilarity of the Vatican blaming child rape on gays (funny, since gays, and liberals in general, are the ones exposing these scandals most consistently and most thoroughly), Ranker made a list of the seven craziest things blamed on gays. Numbers one and two are Catholic child rape and 9/11, and you’ll have to click the clicky to read the rest. But the entire piece can be summed up in one sentence from entry number four:
It seems that fundamentalists blame that which they don’t accept or understand (science) on other things they don’t accept or understand (homosexuality).
Yep yep yep! All religious fundamentalists do this, be they Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or whatever else. Because they’re fundamentally incurious people, and because many of them actually believe that their worldview, however insane and discredited, is correct, things that don’t easily fit, like science, gays, magnets (how do THEY work?) and rainbows have to be awkwardly explained within the confines of their beliefs. The results are absurd.
Things that they don’t like are blamed on gays, blacks, feminists, liberals, Yurp, etc., while things they do like are attributed to, yes, miracles.
