LOL! What actually has "a long history" is the liberals' habit of declaring every conservative as a dimbulb and every liberal as "too smart for the room".
Ann Coulter hilariously documents this behavior in her book, "Slander". Here's an overview I wrote in reply to a liberal "Bush is dumb" parrot:
There are few 100% accurate litmus tests in this world, but
so far I have yet to see a single failure of the one that
says, "anyone who thinks Bush is an idiot is even more
brainless than they think he is."
Disagree with his politics if you wish, but it only makes
you look incredibly foolish when you try to convince yourself
that he's some sort of imbecile despite all evidence to the
contrary.
Other than his verbal fumbles, which are no more an indicator
of intelligence than is dyslexia (and for exactly the same
reasons), Bush has a long track record of being shrewd,
capable, and able to twist his opponents in knots without
breaking a mental sweat.
I wouldn't say he's a rocket scientist, but the man's
clearly far sharper than the average bear, and far more
intelligent than his political opponents would like to admit.
But hey, if childish accusations help you sleep better at
night, may you find some comfort in your delusions.
Lance, you really ought to try thinking for yourself
rather than letting yourself be brainwashed by those
with a political agenda. An excellent starting point
is Ann Coulter's book, "Slander: Liberal Lies About
the American Right". Relevant to the current discussion,
you might want to jump right to chapters 7 ("The Joys
of Arguing with Liberals: "You're Stupid!") and 8
("Clever is as Clever Does: The Liberal Dilemma").
The former documents the monotonous "conservatives
are stupid" mantra in the media, starting with Coolidge
and proceeding without variation until modern day.
The latter documents the media's continued pattern
of proclaiming people on the left as being utterly
brilliant, no matter what the reality might be.
The whole book is both raucously funny, and highly
infuriating. It inescapably documents the mind-numbing
propaganda which passes for "news" coverage (and
"political debate") in this country.
Highlights [I'm snipping out far more than I'm
including]:
If liberals were prevented from ever again
calling Republicans dumb, they would be robbed
of half their arguments. To be sure, they
would still have "racist", "fascist", "homophobe",
"ugly", and a few other highly nuanced arguments
in the quiver. But the loss of "dumb" would
nearly cripple them. Like clockwork, every
consequential Republican to come down the
pike is instantly, invariably, always, without
exception called "dumb".
This is how six-year-olds argue: They call everything
"stupid." The left's primary argument is the
angry reaction of a helpless child deprived of
the ability to mount logical counterarguments.
Someday we will turn to the New York Times editorial
page and find the Newspaper of Record denouncing
President Bush for being a "penis-head".
Note, Coulter documents her characterizations with almost
a thousand media quotes and 35 pages of footnotes.
George Bush (43), with degrees from Yale and
Harvard, is ridiculed for his stupidity by
Hollywood starlets whose course of study is
limited to what they've learned from bald sweaty
little men on casting couches.
[...]
"Stupid" means one thing: "Threatening to the interests
of the Democratic Party." The more conservative the
Republican, the more vicious and hysterical the attacks
on his intelligence will be. Liberals have not only
run out of arguments, they've run out of adjectives.
[...]
Shortly after Reagan won the largest electoral landslide
in history, Gore Vidal quipped, "President Reagan's library
burned down, both books. The tragedy was, he had not
finished coloring the books." [27] In contradistinction
to the anti-Reagan bile of college dropout Michael Moore,
Vidal's remark was at least a joke. It's just that it's
always the same joke.
[...]
Throughout the Reagan years, opposition to any administration
policy -- any policy at all -- never had to be explained
beyond calling it dumb. Since all sophisticated people
knew Reagan was stupid, the proposition that his policies
were stupid because he was stupid was, ipso facto, a good
argument.
[Dozens of examples followed]
And this is how liberals developed their formidable
debating skills.
[snip]
Another Republican who failed to meet the exacting
IQ standards of the media is George W. Bush. The image
of bush as an "air-head" -- as the New York Times
nonjudgementally put it [62] -- has been lovingly
nurtured by the media. During the 2000 presidential
campaign, the media was issuing daily updates on the
Bush intelligence issue, which, as usual, had become
an "issue" solely by virtue of the media's perseverating
that it was an "issue".
[snip lots of documentation]
This was in contrast to John McCain, who graduated fifth
from the bottom of his class at the U.S. Naval
Academy, [65] but was beloved by liberals and,
therefore, never had his intellectual curiosity
questioned. [66]
[...]
In a campaign profile of George Bush's college years,
the Times quoted numerous real people -- including
famed Clinton flack Lanny Davis -- testifying to
Bush's superior intellect. Still, the article
repeatedly insinuated that Bush was an idiot by use
of the Times's signature unsubstantiated asides. [70]
[...]
Most preposterously, the New York Times reported --
as if it were news -- "With his grade and college boards,
Mr. Bush might not have been admitted [to Yale] if he
had applied just a few years later." [73] /"Might not
have been admitted"?/ What on earth does that mean?
Bush also "might not have been admitted" if he had
dropped out of high school and become a Gangsta Rapper.
It so galls Northeastern liberals that Republican
George Bush went to an Ivy League school, they can't
resist publicly fantasizing about an alternative
universe in which Yale rejects him.
When not daydreaming about Republicans being rejected
from Yale, the media spends its time enforcing the
party line on dumb Republicans with Stalinist zeal.
The tiniest deviation from liberal Scriptures will be
ferreted out and the apostate will be held up to
ridicule by the liberal clergy. [Long example and
documentation follow about NYT reporter Frank Bruni
being excoriated from all quarters for noting in
an article that Bush was "plenty bright".]
[...]
The media's fanatical obsession with Bush's minor
slips of the tongue says nothing about Bush's
intelligence and everything about how liberals
demean their political opponents rather than
argue with them. Every human being occasionally
stumbles over words. Only Republicans have their
stumbles giddily repeated ad nauseum, analyzed and
used as epithets, until more Americans can recite
a simple slip of the tongue by a Republican than can
place the Civil War in the correct century. You would
think the geniuses in the media had never made a
mistake themselves.
[Long, hilarious list of brain-dead fumbles by members of the
media follows]
Word stumbles by Democratic politicians are hard to
come by, inasmuch as they are not recycled endlessly
in peevish Maureen Dowd columns. Democrat errors
are buried, forgotten, ignored, and lied about.
Sometimes they are even falsely attributed to
Republicans.
[...]
If accurately correcting a Democrat makes you an idiot,
God help any Republican who misplaces a syllable. In
the 2000 presidential election, the ABC News website
carefully cataloged Bush's every word slip in a section
titled, "The English Patient." There was no "One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest" section for Gore's incessant
lies.
Shockingly though, Democrats are not infallible either.
Here are a few Democratic blunders that somehow made
their way into the public record:
Bill Clinton: "This is still the greatest country in
the world, if we just will steel our wills and
lose our minds." [102]
Al Gore: "A zebra cannot change its spots." [106]
Al Gore: "I always had a very vivid and clear sense
that men and women were entirely and completely
equal -- if not more so." [109]
[snip]
If liberals truly believed verbal fluency was
determinative of IQ, why did they call Reagan dumb?
The peculiar liberal obsession with verbal
facility as a proxy for IQ seemed to recede when
the "Great Communicator" was president.
[...]
Liberals are not only incapable of explaining a
conservative position, they censor conservative
views from the media. Instead of arguing substantive
issues, liberals prefer to drone on and on about the
larger cosmic meaning of Bush saying "subliminable".
It's as if they believe allowing an articulate
statement of the conservative position to
escape into the world will put a religious hex on them.
Until you can intelligently articulate the other
side's position, you are not an adult. You are a liberal.
[...]
Obviously, some portion of the population knew it was
being lied to all along -- and some portion of the
population knew it was doing the lying. But there are
also many people who mechanically adopt any and all
fashionable platitudes. They will look you straight in
the eye, every four years for their entire insipid lives,
and insist that the Republican du jour is "stupid."
(Cher on Bush: "He's stupid." [131])
When America was attacked, even that segment of the
populace had to pull itself away from Lifetime TV
for five minutes to watch the president. And
suddenly, the media had some 'splaining to do. The
Oracle of Delphi was fast losing credibility. Liberals
couldnt' just own up and admit they had lied about
Bush. So instead, they began promoting an
"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" theory of Bush's
performance in wartime. It seemed like a perfectly
plausible story to claim war had miraculously
transformed a dopey, smirking frat boy into...
SUPER BUSH! The only alternative was for the media
to admit they had lied.
[...]
Next chapter, concerning how the media fawns over
the "brilliance" of Democrats:
In a single new York Times profile, a presidential
candidate was repeatedly quoted using such expressions
as "That's no good for sure", and "Isn't she cool?"
Telling a reporter he wanted to discuss "big think" ideas,
he stammered, "I can't say this, it's going to sound
so weird." That was intellectual colossus Al Gore.
naturally, this led the New York Times to query:
"Is Gore too smart to be president?" Mr. Gore's
"challenge", the Times explained in that very article,
is "to show that he is a regular guy despite a
perceived surplus of gravitas, which at least some
Americans seem to find intimidating."
Or as Gore himself eruditely put it, "weird".
This is one of the grave injustices of the world:
Democrats can run ridiculous and insubstantial
men for important national offices and no one
will ever know because the media won't report it.
It is as unthinkable to describe a Democrat as stupid
as it is to describe a Republican as smart. The
adversary press will finish a Democrat's sentences
for him, defend his arguments, provide substantiation
for his ludicrous claims, and refuse to report his
mistakes.
[...]
This has been a fifty-year game of the Emperor's
New Brain, in which only true intellectuals
(the media) are capable of discerning a Democrat's
profound intellect.
[...]
Other Democrats alleged to have been overburdened
by their oversize intellects include Jimmy Carter,
Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and Bill Bradley.
Also every other Democrat you've ever heard of.
[...]
Senator Bill Bradley, Democrat of New Jersey,
was well known to newspaper readers everywhere
by his unofficial first name, "Cerebral" [snip
a dozen quotes of media using the phrase
"the cerebral Bill Bradley" or "the cerebral Bradley"]
CNN's William Schneider [16] and the Los Angeles
Times [17] both reported that Bradley voters, too,
were "cerebral".
But then -- whoops! -- it turned out Bradley got
a 485 on his verbal SATs. [18] That's "cerebral"
for a Democrat. Dumb George Bush got a 566.
[...]
While we wait, let's consider the media's
most stunning accomplishment since persuading
the public that Adlai Stevenson was not a bilious
blowhard: turning Al Gore into a genius. Even
with years of practice, this was quite a feat.
Among Gore's "big think" ideas was his proposal
to ban the internal combustion engine.
[...]
In a 1994 speech, Gore got the country's motto
backward, saying "E Pluribus Unum -- out of one
many." [22] He called Chicago Bulls forward
Michael Jordan "Michael Jackson." (This last
mistake was written up in the Washington Post
in an article that attributed the error to
George Bush and was titled, "Bush's Gaffes are
Back as Debates Near.") [23] When it was
Bush's mistake, the misstatement was big news,
but when it turned out Gore had said it, it
proved absolutely nothing and was promptly
forgotten.
[...]
In case Gore's robust intelligence had somehow
failed to impress the public, the media issued
repeated updates on the fact that Gore was
smart. Amid vague citations to "voters", the
New York Times, [27] USA Today, [28], the
Los Angeles Times, [29] and the National
Journal, [30] among many many others,
all proclaimed Gore is "smart". Gore's subtle
intellect was vividly captured by journalists
Maureen Dowd [31] and David Gergen, [32] both
of whom wrote: "Gore is smart".
These were, of course, the understated
descriptions of Gore's intellectual prowess.
More common was hallucinatory overstatement.
Newsweek gasped that Gore was "thinking about
complexity theory, open systems, Goethe and
the absence of scientific metaphors in
modern society." [33]
[...]
Gore's real school records were abominable.
In high school, Gore received mostly Cs
and Bs in English and history. He got all Cs
in French. Only in art classes did Gore earn
straight As. (And he took a lot of art classes.)
[...]
Having gotten in to Harvard at least in part on
the basis of his father's prominence, Gore did
not redeem himself. In his sophomore year at
Harvard, Gore got one D, one C-minus, two C-pluses,
and one B-minus. This, the Washington Post
reported, "placed him in the bottom fifth of
the class for the second year in a row." [37]
Gore's grades that year "were lower than any
semester recorded on Bush's transcript from
Yale."
[...]
After college, Bush earned an M.B.A. from Harvard;
Gore failed out of divinity school and dropped
out of law school at Vanderbilt University.
Gore failed five of his eight classes in divinity
school. Here's a question for modern philosophers:
How many classes does a Democrat have to fail in
order not to be called "smart"?
[...]
Gore once claimed the biblical story of Cain and
Abel was a parable about the dangers of pollution.
Not original sin, not murder, not envy: pollution.
[...]
The easiest path to being recognized as a genius in
America is to become a completely predictable,
run-of-the-mill, redistributionist Democrat.
Then no matter how dumb you are and how many
ludicrous lies you keep telling, the media will
only remark on your dazzling brilliance. Gore
explained that it wasn't a "fund-raiser", it
was an "event to raise funds". He's a modern
Wittgentstein!
