add this to the list of things Bush has phokked up

It's no longer cool to look stupid.

[Reagan's] advisors proved so unable to get him to read his briefing materials that some of them began conveying the information in cartoon form... In this way, as in so many others, George W. Bush followed the Reagan script. In the 2000 campaign, he famously flubbed a quiz on world leaders and talked defiantly about “Grecians” and “nucular weapons.” He said he knew he was going to win when he read a New Yorker profile in which Al Gore cited the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

But if Reagan burnished the anti-intellectual brand, Bush has now wrecked it. Sometime between the catastrophe in Iraq, the catastrophe in New Orleans and the catastrophe on Wall Street, Americans decided that people who didn’t know much about government weren’t likely to run it very well.

annudder nitpicking, America-hating, smarty-pants elitist mouths off in the New York Times (of course)

Obama and the War on Brainzzz

We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers* as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.

Oooooh, listen everyone, Mister Science is talking!

* Was dat a swipe at Da Elf?

Christopher Buckley: wid da tarrists

No real surprise here, as you can't get through more than two or three sentences of his effete, snobby prose without being hit across the Sizzlin-Picante-dusted maw with the realization that he is an elitist. I'm sorry -- an ELITIST. Maybe they should feed him to a hungry McCain/Palin rally and watch them fight over who gets to devour his still-beating heart...

Christopher Buckley, Meet the Conservative Mob

Remember last week, when Christopher Buckley took his Obama endorsement to The Daily Beast so as not to offend his National Review readers? Well, no such luck. It looks like the aggrieved readers got to him anyway. Buckley writes about his abrupt departure from the magazine in his latest Daily Beast column.