Genius Boy Bill Clinton was a caretaker president who had a balanced budget thrust upon him by a Republican Congress in his first term. Economically, he was in the right place at the right time. I.e., His second term rode the dot.com boom which eventually decomposed into the dot.bomb bust as Bush came into office. Much like the next president will now inherit the wreckage of the real estate quagmire. Same illusion, different domain.

And Betsey Wright. Wasn't she the person who labeled Clinton's juvenile lack of discipline (and personal morality BTW) "Bimbo Eruptions"? Sorry, reading books does not cancel out being a slob. That second failing had a profound impact on Clinton’s presidency making him the mediocrity that he still is in totality. Oh yeah, where did he go to school again?

George Bust is an idiot just because he's an idiot. He is actually an avid reader too. But still an idiot. So your correlation collapses under the weight of Clinton’s narcissism and Bush’s ignorance.

Re: "There is a longstanding anti-intellectual streak in the Republican Party." Let me pass that observation on to the families of Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, Mortimer Adler, et al. And to Irving Kristol, Thomas Sowell, Robert George and others. I’ll use small words so that they understand.

The Democratic left’s message atrophied into statist cant 30 years ago with the collapse of New Deal liberalism because it did not work. (Have you taken a look at Detroit lately?) Like it or not, it was the conservative intellectual engine that sparked new ideas.

The disdain for the “eggheads” is simply predicated on the fact that the university elites have barricaded themselves in their departments permitting little dissension from the leftist theology that has been a proven failure. They subsist almost exclusively on smug self-importance. Stuck in the eccentric obit of leftist intellectual irrelevance for life. (Or not getting tenure. Whichever comes first.)

“Academic politics are so vicious because there is so little at stake.” Henry Kissenger.

Sarah Non Sequitur skirts her ultra-right xian domestic program.

Palin is Peter Pan, a never-grow-up tomboy. How else to characterize a mental and behavioral juvenile who opines that human beings and dinosaurs walked together in a world at most 6,000 years old. Abandon rationality and honesty if you would be one with her.

Millions of fundies who want a theocratic America -- an Ameristan, complete with puritanism and fanaticism -- will forgive her handlers' subterfuges. After all, she's lying in a holy cause as a shill for dominionism.

We know exactly what Sarah Palin reads -- it's the Bible in its ultra-right ideological interpretation by the Dobson and Hagee crowd. That's the only source for law and morals, domestic and foreign policy, war strategy and negotiating tactics.

Fundies hate what the US has become. Christian fideists, just like Islamic fideists, cannot tolerate an open society, a pluralist culture, or a secular state. They wax nostalgic for racism, for male dominated social control, for misogyny, for unquestioned acceptance of religious tyranny (not by those labels of course).

Palin has tried to conceal her own warped desire for bringing to life Margaret Atwood’s wretched dystopia stripped bare in her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.

Millions far saner than Sarah still do not know what's in her mind . . . unenlightened beliefs clogged by (Super-size me Jesus!) junk-food faith.

John, your observation that conservatives like Palin have trouble keeping an open mind is well supported by the finding that they have greater difficulty than liberals to switch from one simple task to another. That is, conservatives have a greater tendency than liberals to persist in what they're doing even when this is no longer appropriate (Amodio et al, Nature Neuroscience, 2007).