" a black nationalist from Kenya smuggled into the United States to kill Sarah Palin’s baby."

[lindysalsagal]

Bill Moyers, talking about the anti-intellectual forces making up absurd accusations about Obama before his election.
"So here we are, wallow­ing in our dysfunction. Governed—if you listen to the rabble rousers—by a black nationalist from Kenya smuggled into the United States to kill Sarah Palin’s baby.” Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal, Sept. 4, 2009.

Truthout.org
http://www.truth-out.org/between-race-and-reason-anti-intellectualism-american-life/1314634662#3

Between Race and Reason: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
Friday 16 September 2011
by: Susan Searls Giroux, Stanford University Press | Book Excerpt

“How did politics in the U.S. come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance?” In a rather unkind primatological allusion, he invoked as evidence the eight-year reign of George W. Bush, the recent vogue of Sarah Palin—and before her, Dan Quayle, apparently to round out the VP wing of “gibbering numbskulls” past and present—as well as the “screaming ignoramuses” in attendance at Republican rallies who insisted that Barack Obama was both a Muslim and a terrorist. “Like most people on my side of the Atlantic,” he ventured, “I have for many years been mystified by American politics. The U.S. has the world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It domi­nates in discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed na­tions . . . learning is a grave political disadvantage.”

[NRaleighLiberal]

1. To me, the worst insult of the Bush years was how it promoted pride in ignorance. n/t

[Archae]

4. Goes back longer than the Bush years.

About 60 years ago Issac Asimov wrote an essay called "The Cult Of Ignorance," where he wrote about how ignorance and outright stupidity were accepted, and even celebrated.

[Pyrzqxgl]

2. I've always felt that somewhere at a Republican strategy meeting there's talk of

Reducing the effectiveness of Education to make people dumber & voting GOP. I'll bet the Koch Brothers pushed that idea.

[lindysalsagal]

5. Remember that old Twlight Zone episode where they gave the little boy a test and his

parents said, "Ok, Billy. Don't try too hard on the test. Just go through it fast and come right out?"

Billy never came out of there.

:scared:

It was a society that kept the commoners dumb and happy, and literally killed off the children who did to well on the test.
There's a reason that idea made it onto that show, and it was so frightening.

[KamaAina]

3. Glen Rice is from Kenya?

:sarcasm: