Republicans Cultivate Anti-Intellectualism

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Updated December 18:

In the comments section, Uncle Milton disagrees with me when I say that the Republican Party has been cultivating anti-intellectualism for a long time now. He goes on to list a number of bright Republican politicians, but concedes Gerald Ford was a dunce.

They truth is this. The Republicans have been cultivating anti-intellectualism and just being shit-ignorant in general for a long time now.

In part this has roots in pro-business culture. For a long time in the US, the business and money crowd was aggressively anti-education and anti-intellectual.

I've worked around rich people a lot so I know it still exists. For many years as I was growing up, I could not count the businessmen who delighted in telling me that they either hadn't spent a day in college or didn't have a degree. The idea was that you didn't need a degree to make money, and college just got in the way of making a buck.

One great thing about MBA-addiction is that we seem to have done away with that silliness once and for all. Now, for an entry-level position at many corporations and other institutions, a BA or BS from an accredited university is required. Increasingly, a degree is indeed required in order to make decent money.

I've also spent a lot of my life around some real intellectuals, including the poetry crowd, the artist and art crowd, the writer crowd and the Hollywood crowd. A lot collected books and art, listened to opera, went to art movies, the theater, seminars and dance performances, and could bend your ear about all sorts of highbrow stuff. As a general rule, while these folks were not poor, they were not rich by any stretch.

The truth is that the Republican Party cultivates nothing less than hatred for educated people, intellectualism, knowledge, culture and brains. They hate college professors, they hate intellectuals, they hate Hollywood.

Of course many Republican politicians, thinkers, authors and voters are very smart. Sure they have advanced degrees, law degrees and medical degrees. Sure they write books and whatnot.

But the message and tone of the party is deep contempt and hatred for education, college degrees, advanced degrees, intellectuals, eggheads, all of that.

Ronald Reagan was a fucking dumbass and a hardcore anti-intellectual. He was not smart enough to be either governor or President. I don't care what his IQ was.

A friend of my father's met him once at a party in Los Angeles when Reagan was head of the Screen Actors Guild, and said he was really friendly but not that smart. A friend of my grandmother's dated him in Iowa and said the exact same thing about him. That's what everyone said about him. She dumped him because he was too dumb for her.

It was under Reagan that anti-intellectualism was cultivated to an extreme degree. With every stupid, idiotic, dumb-fuck thing this moron said, the Republicans just cheered more and more. It was like the more stupid shit he said, the more delirious they were. They weren't ashamed at all. They were rolling in the mud.

They were finally sticking it to the ivory tower eggheads, the weenie desegregationist judges, Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativism" (a clever dig at academia) and Wallace's "pointy-headed liberals who can't even park their bicycles straight" (same thing). It was like a revenge party of stupid, and it carried on for most of a decade.

Gerald Ford is a very intelligent man with a very high IQ.

Richard Nixon was a very smart guy.

George Bush Sr. is not only extremely smart, but he is also a real intellectual.

George W. Bush is intelligent. I read a 5-6 page interview with him in a major news magazine once and I came away thinking, "All this time I thought this guy was dumb, but he's actually a bright fellow." But he is not a deep thinker, nor is he intellectual at all, and furthermore, he is unbelievably shit-ignorant.

He continues the aggressive cultivation of ignorance started with Reagan.

Sarah Palin, an intelligent woman who is also appallingly ignorant for the job she is running for, continues in Reagan's footsteps.

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Drill, Drill, Drill!

This is the classic Republican campaign. Gas prices are very high, probably to a great deal due to George Bush's reckless militarism in invading Iraq and then threatening Iran, and so the Republicans hope to turn this into...even more of a windfall for the oil companies.

Apologists for the oil companies love to point out that the oil companies are not behind the skyrocketing prices. Fair enough, but the oil companies are indeed generating record profits in the midst of skyrocketing prices! Skyrocketing oil prices = skyrocketing oil company profits! Nice equation, huh?

It is so despicable and cynical for the Republicans to play politics with this bullshit. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and many other top Bush Administration officials are all oil company hacks going way back. John McCain is in deep with oil companies and Sarah Palin is more or less married to oil companies.

Listen up fools. Do you get it? Record gas prices = record oil company profits. What's not to love. The Republican Party is the party of the oil companies, so massive run-ups in gas prices are good times! Got it? Bush, Cheney, Condi, Palin and McCain are digging these high oil prices! Their babies, the oil companies, are swimming in money. And they're all so rich, they don't care about price at the pump anyway. The higher the better.

So, while the Republican Party obviously swoons over high gasoline prices, at the same time, the morons who support them are hopping mad about these same skyrocketing prices at the pump. The idiots can't figure out that their beloved Republican Party loves gas price run-ups and is laughing all the way to the bank. They're mad about gas prices, and they're voting Republican! They're typical retarded American White people!

So the Republican Party decides to play to the idiots. They pretend to be all concerned about the gas price run-ups. The way to lower the pump price (Which is bad for oil companies, so it's bad for the Republican Party) is to drill, drill, drill!

Wait a minute. Gas prices anymore have nothing to do with supply and demand. It's all just crazy market-driven speculation. The price at the pump just dropped dramatically in the past two months. What happened? Changes in supply and demand fundamentals? Course not! Nothing has changed. What changed? The mood of the speculators on the world's two oil bourses, one in New York and the other in London.

Lately, Republican phony liars like Newt Gingrich have come out against the evil speculators! They don't care anything about speculators, and most Republicans got rich through some speculative bullshit anyway. But hey, it plays good to the White idiots!

If we drill, drill, drill, drill, all over the US, it's going to...? Whoa! So flood the market with crude, it's going to, like, force the evil speculators to lower oil prices! Oh yeah! Never mind that you can't force a speculator to do anything. Never mind that declining gas prices are bad for oil companies and bad for Republican oil plutocrats. It's time to play politics with moronic Americans!

The latest thing is to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Palin and all of Alaska wants this because their oil checks will increase. By the year 2022, the oil from ANWR will finally come onto the market. And...it's possible...that all that oil...could lower the price of gas by, like, 4-5 cents a gallon. Wow! Or maybe it won't. No one knows, because oil prices have nothing to do with supply-demand fundamentals.

But it sounds so simple, huh? Wallet-killing prices at the pump? Solution? Drill, drill, drill. That will lower the prices, right? Not necessarily. Maybe not by even one penny. But it sounds so logical to your average fool.

What will drill, drill, drill do? Make beau-coup bucks for oil companies and their sleazy Republican agents. Great. Let's all line up behind that. I'm White! I'm dumb! I'm voting Republican! Oh yeah!

Here's all the land that is open to the oil companies that they are refusing to drill on for some insipid reason. Why are they refusing to drill on this land? I have no idea! Maybe someone who can figure out what's going on can explain this nonsense. There's tons of land open to oil companies, but they are refusing to drill on it. Instead, they want to open up lands that are forbidden to them. Doesn't make sense. Someone explain this one to me?