Ohio righty bloggers debunking the myth of conservative intelligence

One of the great frauds of conservative talk radio, and now the blogosphere, is that they claim to be "smart", "intellectual", full of "thought", and "common sense", like some wicked band of high-minded debate ninjas running rings around their oppressors with their deep and irrefutable "logic". They wrap themselves and their blogs and radio shows with positively Aristotlian philosophical fantastitude.

People with real brains have always known this to be utterly laughable, that the "thought leaders" in the conservative panoply of nonsense are merely giving their neanderthal audience an intellectual permission slip, much like the geeky hall monitor used to in high school, to go to the bathroom and eject their excrement into our polity. Oh lookie! Smart people agree with my neanderthal-ness! And they have smarty-pants arguments, too! They use big words! I must be sooooo onto something! Pass the toilet paper.

It also happens to be the esential ingredient in the Bush adminstration's justification for the Iraq war. See! All these "think tanks" and their "emeriti" and their "fellows" came up with this "neo-conservative"...ahem...."theory"! It's a smart thing! Smartness! Woo-hoooo! To the tanks! Onward, moronic neanderthals!

Barack Obama's ascent, as it has done with many other aspects of our political discourse, is completely de-bunking this myth. And like many other Obama phenomena (Obamana?), it isn't Obama or his supporters that debunk the myth, it's the myth peddlers themselves with their own words.

Just take a look around at the rightysphere in Ohio. It's pretty hard to argue you are being some kind of great thinker when the litany of playground name-calling is endless, repeated, vitriolic, and bordering on all-out racism. They have thought experiments (ha!), they border on anti-semitism, they pretend to be all scholarly with all sorts of citations and footnotes and thingies like that. And the end result is that they are a parody of themselves. And that's just the blogosphere.

It's gonna be fun to watch. Because when Barack Obama is president, proving every one of their "arguments" to be utter nonsense, I'm not sure what mantle of intellectuality they'll have left to lie about.