The majority of the population supports, for example, real health care reform with at least a “true” public option, if not single-payer.

“I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

The most coherent argument against the anti-itellectualism spreading around the country. Thank you.

Please sign the Tea Party Pledge

http://www.conservativeexodusproject.com/

and tell everyone you know to sign it. Thanks.

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But like anniemargaret said, this conservative anti-intellectualism has to stop. Don’t try and tell me that the high-school dropout working the cash register at McDonald’s has the same amount of intellectual bearing or firepower or political savvy as someone who graduated with a Ph. D. from the Kennedy School at Harvard. They just don’t. Education matters.

And if educated people don’t want to indulge the incoherent fantasies of angry mobs, maybe it’s because the mobs are just wrong. They don’t know what they want. They demand lower taxes and decreased government spending, so long as it doesn’t affect them. But when their Social Security or Medicare checks are imperiled, you can be damn sure that they’re all for their piece of the Federal dime. The truth is that spending needs to be significantly cut AND taxes need to be significantly raised. It’s the only way. But try suggesting a tax increase (or even the expiration of a tax cut) to a Tea Party crowd, and see how far you get with charts and graphs and budget reports. Not quite as sexy as “Don’t tread on me” and “Second American Revolution”, and other such nonsense, is it?

You wouldn’t want Joe Six-Pack performing your kidney transplant, and you wouldn’t want Joe Six-Pack managing your investments, so why on earth would you want Joe Six-Pack running your government? That’s the essence of representative democracy – most people aren’t equipped or inclined to deal with the problems of running the government, so they elect qualified representatives to do it full-time for them. The conservative conceit (and it goes all the way back to Buckley saying he’d rather be ruled by the first 400 names in the phone book than the Harvard faculty) that a government can be effectively run by just about anyone, based on their feelings and intuitions, is downright poisonous.

And now you see its fruits – one of our two major parties in this country no longer even pretending that it’s interested in responsible governance, and the whole conservative movement openly hijacked by the mob.

Yes, intellectuals and technocrats make mistakes, and they do need to be kept accountable to the needs and interests of the people they represent and work for. So far as this, I agree with you. But the wholehearted (and, yes, very smug – it’s harder to be a liberal in the Bible Belt than a conservative in Georgetown) embrace of anti-science and anti-intellectualism is a cancer that has been allowed to go on for far too long.

However, the public is also being force fed a constant barrage of attacks on Obama – many of them misleading if not outright lies.

You yourself, Sinz, are either a victim or a willing participant in this. A number of times here you have criticized Obama for not saying one thing or another – and I’ve provided direct quotes from very prominent speeches (his Inaugural Address, his Healthcare speech, his Afghanistan speech, his address to the Nobel Committee, his SOTU) where he has said virtually exactly what you’ve called for.

And you’re far more informed than the average voter … who just hears Fox News and Tea Partiers screaming “socialism!”