The left's gallery of cretins

Warning: This column contains language some readers may find offensive.

This is the age of the idiot. The triumph of Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber in American culture and politics is not in dispute. However, my modest proposal of last week still stands.

I ventured that the developing consensus among some self-styled elites (as opposed natural elites) with respect to Sarah Palin's aptitude was premature. I am simply unconvinced Gov. Palin is an exemplar of dumbed down, distaff America.

Smart alec lefty Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone magazine disagrees. He calls Sarah Palin "a puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious beliefs. … 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV." Hardly an argument, is it? (Hence "smart alec," and not smart.)

Once Taibbi dispensed with the niceties, he got dirty. What Palin represents to Taibbi is "being a fat f---ing pig who pins 'Country First' buttons on his man ti---es and chants 'U-S-A! U-S-A!'"

Another smarmy smart alec is the libertine Bill Maher. The host of HBO's "Real Time" called Palin "a category five moron." "She thought the Bush doctrine has something to do with forbidding her daughters to shave down there," he snickered, adding cruelly that "her favorite welcome-home sign on arriving back in Alaska was her daughter's. It read: 'I got my period.'"

In case you don't know him, Maher is the intellectual pigmy who once told TV talker Joe Scarborough he wanted Bush impeached – but not for anything meaningful, such as, say, prosecuting an illegal and unjust war. Rather, Maher argued impassionedly, and quite seriously, that impeachment proceedings ought to be initiated on no other grounds than that, on 9/11, after Bush had been told by Andrew Card that America had been attacked, he sat put for seven minutes at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School. Maher's motivation for impeachment is as frivolous as the impetus for Clinton's (or as mindless as Maher's anti-corn syrup carping).

The left has offered accolades to individuals infinitely more asinine and far less accomplished than Gov. Palin.

Take Jesse Jackson. I'm completely comfortable calling the revered reverend a deeply silly "dude." The evidence is incontrovertible and decades old. A public berating of that bit of dreck is long overdue. Granted, Jackson is not running for vice president, but he did run for president. And I'm willing to bet that not many establishment media men have identified Jackson for the jackass he is.

On the sub-prime mortgage mess Jackson served up a word salad that gave Lauren Caitlin Upton of the 2007 Miss Teen USA fame a run for her money. (Caitlin was asked why so many "Americans can't locate the U.S. on a world map." Her reply included references to "U.S. Americans," "South Africa," "Eyeraq," "Asian countries," "our children," each prefaced by the "sophisticated" phrase "such as.")

The following is vintage Jackson verbiage disgorged to a receptive Amy Goodman of Democracy Now: "22 percent of those sub-primes went to African-Americans. About 22 percent went to Latinos. But the water came in the ship on the black and brown side":

The water did not stay; the water kept coming across. So now what you have is whole communities without their – when one house goes, suddenly the houses lose value. And so, the value is leaving, tax base eroding, schools are suffering, all because unregulated banking up top and lack of fair lending laws. If you were to enforce fair lending laws at the base, the water – you know, the sink – the ship did not sink because chairs blew off the deck; water came in the bottom. And water came in the bottom, because the poor people and middle-class people in fact were taken advantage of and slaughtered.

The jury is no longer out about Cynthia McKinney's intelligence. A former United States representative and the Green Party's nominee for president, McKinney is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who believes the Bush administration orchestrated the events of that day. Among her legislative accomplishments: the "Tupac Shakur Records Act."

The left didn't laugh these one-time White-House hopefuls off the political stage, did it?

Presidential candidates, past and present (and their spouses), flock to a television show called "The View," where they snuggle up to – and play footsie with – some seriously foolish females.

On "The View," the earth is often flat – at least to co-host Sherri Shepherd, who has also "argued," convincingly to some, that Jesus preceded the Greeks.

Speaking of the left's intelligentsia, unlike Taibbi and Maher, who made a "case" against Palin's candidacy by cussing, Joy Behar at least tried to "argue." The result? The most originally asinine anti-Palin argument to date:

You know, the one thing that I don't think anybody's said yet is that she's very mean to animals, this woman. Why does she have it in for these poor polar bear and the caribou and she aerial kills wolves? That's a very mean thing to do. … I don't think that's very nice, do you? I think that that's an important point we should all be looking at.

So now it's Palin's PETA papers that aren't in order. Put it this way: If Rep. Ron Paul clubbed seals to death on ice floes, I'd still consider him a smashing potential president. (If he fired a trooper who abused his power, all the better.)

For advancing such "argument," the not-very-bright Behar ought to have been intellectually disemboweled. Needless to say, she's more often than not applauded by mediacrats.

Besides, and to press my point, what is this standard against which Palin is being measured and found so woefully inadequate? Cheney? Bush? John Kerry? Heinz Kerry? Hillary? Harry Reid? Harriet Miers? King Henry (Paulson)? Barney had-an-affair-with-a-male-prostitute Frank? Nancy Pelosi? Al Sharpton? Chuck Schumer? Charlie Rangel? Joe Biden (who stated during the vice presidential debate that "the Constitution calls for" "same-sex benefits," when it says nothing about benefits, hetero or homo)?

Come now.

When it comes to their cretinism quotient, there are plenty candidates more qualified than Sarah Palin, starting in Washington, on Wall Street and in the nation's editorial rooms.