Nice ‘n’ snarky Dov Fischer NRO column (instigated by a Robert Scheer rant) on the “I.Q. question”:

Scheer’s writing reflects the polemic arrogance monopolized by a Left that is convinced its ranks are just too smart for conservatives to fathom and that conservatives are just too troglodytic to be liberal. Thus, as Paul Bacon has written, Gerald R. Ford was consistently mocked during his presidency as a bumbling and stumbling fool. (In fact, Ford played on two championship football teams at the University of Michigan, and his athletic dexterity was rewarded when he was named a college all-star. He simultaneously was named a Phi Beta Kappa at that top-ten college and went on to earn a Juris Doctor degree at Yale Law School, commonly regarded as one of the nation’s two finest law schools.)

Liberal critics regularly mocked Ronald Reagan as a dumb actor who could not conceive an original thought but relied on cue cards. (This, despite Reagan having been elected president of a prominent union of exceptionally opinionated and discerning members, the Screen Actors Guild, and having served two terms as elected governor of America’s most populous state.) The first President George Bush was the butt of the slogan: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ And the current president, who earned his bachelor’s degree at Yale and his M.B.A. at Harvard, is mocked for flubbing words and is depicted as lacking the intelligence a liberal would expect of a Democrat counterpart like, say, erstwhile journalism professor Al Gore. As for the only conservative president in the past half century who manifestly was smart, the liberals dismissed Richard Nixon’s intelligence as ‘tricky.’

By contrast, we were told that Jimmy Carter was not merely a peanut farmer but really a particularly brilliant man, studious and capable of grasping every detail of his office, and we were reminded constantly that Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar out of Yale. (Only two Democrats have held the presidency in the past 34 years, a sign of someone’s intelligence.)

It is not clear why the Left is so smug about its supposed brilliance. Under Jimmy Carter, interest rates nearly hit 20 percent. Was the Left convinced that Gerald Ford, Carter’s predecessor, maintained inflation in the four-percent range because he could not match Carter’s ability to multiply mortgage rates by percentages five times higher? Moreover, under Carter, an antediluvian Islamic cleric held our entire nation hostage for so long that the Ayatollah’s drama literally created a steady viewership over fourteen months for a new network television show, Nightline. The Carter years also saw the United States give up the Panama Canal, the Soviets invade Afghanistan and extend their hegemony into Africa, even prompting new Marxist rumblings in South America. In response, Carter pulled our Olympic athletes out of world competition to make a moral statement that he understood better than did a less sophisticated Leonid Brezhnev.

And it just gets worse from there.

By the way, I had no idea Robert Scheer studied economics at the Center for Chinese Studies at Berkeley. I need to pay better attention to such things.

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