Bumper Stickers

As if to provide reinforcement to the arrogant and elitist (albeit, honest) comments of Jonathan Gruber on Obamacare, someone named Allen Clifton wrote the following on a far left blog called Forward Progressives (h/t: The Belmont Club) under the headline "The Simple Truth: President Obama is Too Intelligent for Republicans to Understand":

A few years back I worked with a guy who was probably a genius. In fact, he often struggled in life interacting with people because his brain simply performed at a higher level than the average person. I remember asking him what his biggest belief was in making life decisions and he always, without fail, told me “think of the bigger picture.” And while I’ve always tried to be a big picture thinker, knowing him when I did helped me understand it a little better. …

Which brings me to President Obama. While I’m not calling him a genius, I do think he’s extremely intelligent. I also believe that his tendency to use “big picture” thinking while drafting policy is something most Republican voters simply can’t understand. …

When it comes right down to it, I really do believe a huge part about why so many of the non-racist Republicans are against President Obama is because many of them are simply unable to grasp his “big picture” thinking that drives a lot of his policies. That requires intelligence and far too many conservative would rather just be told what to think by Fox News. They want their policies to be so simplified and catchy that they fit on bumper stickers.

Yeah, sorta like the bumper stick "Hope and Change," I suppose.

But I get it. Obama is soooo smart that what appears to us stupid people in the center to be abject policy failure and very bad decisions are nothing more than successes masked in the nuance of great intellect that understands the "big picture" in ways unavailable to us little folks. The sea of data that indicates things like a weak economy, a failed health policy, a nation in so much debt that it will eventually fail, isn't to be believed because really, really smart guys in the White House have things well in control. Scandal after scandal is to be ignored because really, really smart guys are incapable of corruption in the name of politics and besides, all of the scadals are "phoney" anyway. A foreign policy that has lead to chaos in the Middle East, a newly aggressive Russia, a massive expansion in Islamist thuggery around the world is nothing more than a blip on this president's "reset" with Islam. The denigration of long time allies (e.g., Israel) and the accommodation of long-time enemies (e.g., Iran) isn't stupid, it's brilliant. After all, look at how Iran has dropped its bid to become a nuclear ... oh, that didn't happen, did it?

Allen Clifton is representative of almost every true Leftist. He thinks he and his follow ideologues are really, really smart and that everyone who doesn't agree is really, really stupid. Lead by a far-Left president, who must therefore be considered the smartest of the smart, Clifton enters into the realm of delusion and fantasy where facts don't matter, resources are unlimited, threats are to be ignored, and an electorate that rejects his fantasy ideology is dumb. As William F. Buckley, a conservative writer and pundit once said: “Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.”

But what I just wrote won't fit on a bumper stick, so I'm unclear on whether than makes me smart or stupid.