Via commenter Noni Mausa, we learn ... well, nothing we didn't already know. And, really, is there any better money quote than:
... unfortunately, too many Republicans are still refusing to acknowledge that idiocy has consequences, too.
AFTERSNARK: After you read that article, read it again. And again. And upon each re-reading, appreciate how deliciously and devastatingly it applies to Canada's Right, particularly the anti-intellectual mob known as the Blogging Tories. The equivalence is downright spooky.
3 comments:
The last time the Gop got blown away was 1964. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., writer of "Conscience of a Conservative," ran on a state's rights platform against Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act. Goldwater carried the South, nothing else.
The Gop leadership then made their deal with the devil, which they described as the "Southern Strategy." The Gop succeeded in drawing the South away from the Democrats. The Southern Strategy worked as long as the Gop was able to appeal to some people outside the South. In the northern industrial states, this meant appealing to southern migrants, or, at least, white migrants.
You don't appeal to Southerners or to white migrants by talking above their heads. They are anti-intellectual because education is a threat to their religious belief system. This started in the middle of the nineteenth century when the educated main line protestant preachers began to try to reconcile slavery with Christianity. They had to dumb down Christianity to save slavery and, later "Jim Crow."
The Gop cannot move off the anti-intellectual thing without abandoning the Southern Strategy. But the Cop finds itself in a position today where it cannot sell its wares outside the South.
As a footnote, Johnson probably could have retained the South in 1964. Goldwater was Jewish, the only Jewish candidate ever nominated for president be either party. Johnson never mentioned Goldwater's religion. He just mentioned, her and there and everywhere, that Goldwater was going to start a nuclear war and end up blowing up the United States.
10:07 AM
Update: Karen Parker, formerly conservative columnist, has gone all "Armband religion is killing the Republican Party." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/18/AR2008111802886.html
Funny how major media is suddenly reporting on things the rest of us have known for years now.
This doesn't make anything better. In fact, it's just another reason to make sure none of these enterprises get any more of our money.
Heh:
They take their opinions from talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and the deeply unsubtle Sean Hannity.
Deeply unsubtle. That describes Hannity to a "T".
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