Liberal Snobbery v9.0Joe Conason wins the award for the most snobbish, condescending, and elitist liberal pundit in the country with this line from
his NY Observer column this morning:
To observe George W. Bush talking trash, chewing with his mouth open and demonstrating his ignorance of geography marks still another step down in the continuing decline of U.S. prestige. It's the diplomatic equivalent of flag burning.
A close runner-up is Jon Chait, who
wrote this in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday under the heading, "Is Bush Still Too Dumb to Be President?:"
It's true that presidents can succeed without being intellectuals themselves. The trouble is that Bush isn't just a nonintellectual, he viscerally disdains intellectuals. "What angered me was the way such people at Yale felt so intellectually superior and so righteous," he told a Texas Monthly reporter in 1994.
When I went to college at Michigan, I occasionally played pickup basketball with varsity football players. They obviously felt athletically superior to me. I didn't resent them for it -- because they were.
Note to Conason and Chait: if you want Bush to make a rebound in the polls, keep it up.
One of the major failings of liberals (and liberalism in general) is an attitude that reeks of smugness, of arrogance, and of a sense of intellectual and cultural superiority. They're enlightened, the rest of us are not. And, as a matter of policy, they know what's best for us poor unwashed dolts living between Manhattan and Berkeley, and Brentwood and Georgetown. Limosine liberals often fail to connect with "regular" people because they talk down to them, primarily because liberals view so many of their values with contempt - especially if we're talking about the South.
So it is with the latest revelation of Bush's unscripted remark to Tony Blair. Not only are most people not offended by what the President said (or, more directly to Conason's snobbery, the way in which Bush chewed his food), I'm sure many people feel Bush's use of the s-word, which he believed to be a private remark, was not only apt but also the kind of blunt talk that's needed these days.
