Newt and Mitt Are Playing the ‘Stupid Card’

Why don't the GOP candidates want us to go to college or read newspapers?

By Larry Doyle | @thelarrydoyle | January 31, 2012 | +

“He is counting on us not having YouTube. That’s how much he thinks we’re stupid,” Newt Gingrich yelled at Floridians a couple days ago, before adding, tongue in jowl, “and we’re not stupid.”

Leaving aside the questionable link between YouTube and non-stupidity, Gingrich has a point. Mitt Romney does think we’re stupid. Gingrich, on the other hand, knows we’re stupid, at least compared to Gingrich, whose ideas are so large only a head of his size can contain them. And they are both towing the internal party line. The leaders of the GOP not only think we are stupid, they are doing everything possible to keep us that way.

“It’s no wonder President Obama wants every kid to go to college,” Rick Santorum carefully explained to some other Floridians last week. “The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America.” Such indoctrination would presumably include critical thinking, which none of the candidates wants anybody doing or geometry, which might have been what Gingrich was referring to when he accused Romney of thinking “the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together.” In addition to warning young Americans away from the evil secularism of biochem, Santorum also had a thought on charitable giving to alma maters: “Stop it.”

Anti-intellectualism has long been in the GOP arsenal, going back to the name-calling of the original egghead, Adlai Stevenson II, and continuing to Rick Perry’s spinning his inability to remember all the federal agencies he would eliminate (he did remember Education) by proudly declaring he was not a “debater-in-chief” like some people. But it is no longer enough not to be smart; an ideal voter must be ill-informed as well.

                                      From www.time.com