Rightardia wasn't sure what a recent Sarah Palin Tempest in a Tea Pot was all about. This event happened last August when the White House Chief of Staff was attacking liberal groups who were unhappy with the Obama health care plan. We weren't sure why the 'has been' Sarah Palin would bring this up at this late of date.
Apparently it was the word retarded that got her goat. Of course, Emanuel was not making a reference to people with disabilities. Sarah Palin would probably be unhappy with the name of this blog which combines the word right with retarded.
Rightardia does believe that many right wingers are intellectually and morally retarded. This is to say that they are not the intellectual equals of progressives and liberals in the Democratic party. That is not to say that Republicans have less intelligence than Democrats.
The GOP has disintegrated into an anti-intellectual party of under educated people who are led by fraternity brother and sorority sisters that came out of the Greek system. Southern fundamentalist colleges have also produced many of the Republican leaders.
People like George W. Bush, John McCain and Sarah Palin underperformed in school. The newly elected Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia wrote a biased master's theses that would not be accepted in a main stream public or private college.
The evangelical C-Streeters and The Family are scary and the founder of the movement, Abraham Vereide, was openly sympathetic to the fascist movements in Europe during the Great Depression. Spokesman like Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh never finished college.
The last Republicans to win a Nobel Prize was Henry Kissinger and the last GOP president was Theodore Roosevelt, one of the founders of the progressive movement in the US.
Many of the conservatives have a distorted view of American history and insist the United States was founded as a Christian nation. The First Amendment and the Treaty of Tripoli suggest otherwise.
The right also suggests that the nation was founded on corporate values, yet the words corporation and free enterprise are not found in the US Constitution. Private property is only found in one place and indicates the government must reimburse it citizens for property the government takes under eminent domain.
The Supreme Court recently ruled that corporations have the same rights as citizens and can make unlimited political contributions under the First Amendment. This is an activist ruling and the Supreme Court should have showed more restraint in overturning the bipartisan McCain-Feingold law. This indicates this conservatism anti-intellectualism has even infiltrated the Supreme Court.
Where does anti-intellectualism lead? Look at Germany prior to World War 2. After Hitler rose to power, many of the intellectuals in the country and the Jewish scientists fled the country. But on whom does a society depend for the illumination that she demanded? The answer, increasingly, is—on the intellectuals.
In December 1936, for example, the exiled German novelist Thomas Mann responded to notice of the revocation of his Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Bonn University. To a dean at Bonn, he wrote of his "irrepressible disgust" for the Nazi regime and then accused German universities of "a heavy responsibility for the present sufferings which they called down upon their heads."
Wilhelm Röpke, professor of economics at Marburg University until his dismissal in the spring of 1933, agreed with Mann's accusation.
He wrote that "it was precisely the university professors that failed when the need came for courageous defense of the ultimate values of our civilisation." Their inaction was fatal because "it resulted in the crippling of the conscience of the German nation."
Rightardia is glad we have outspoken liberal and progressive professors in the US. It will keep the country form heading down the road that the German's did prior to World War 2.
Every time a Republicans is elected, we start up our war machines and head down the road to oblivion. You would think the American electorate would get smarter about war.
We really haven't won even a limited war since World War 2.
What is the point of starting another war if the country will never taste victory? What is the point of starting a war that is not sanctioned by the UN?
sources: http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1978/spring/sims-intellectuals-crisis/ and http://www.bnd.com/polls/story/1114500.html
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