Well…I’ve been listening to some of the repub candidates and the new, or not so new, talking point has to do with the class warfare they want to foment between themselves, the just regular folks, and the “East coast or political elites” that they say have screwed up this country. Let’s take the statement by Carly Fiorina, the fired ex-head of Hewlett Packard who ran the company into the ground and then parachuted out with a 50 million dollar severance which has powered her race in California. A race that she has spent almost 40 million dollars of her own money on to get elected, and that has for one of the main themes the attacks on the “elites” that run this country. Now, I think that someone who can spend 40 million dollars of their own money on a political campaign pretty elite, don’t you? And yet, the people that follow her are eating this stuff up. Are they too stupid or are they too blinded by rage to do the thinking that would make this assertion by Carly laughable at best?

Then, we have the anti intellectual Christine O’Donnell making fun of the fact and bursting her chest with pride that she didn’t go to Yale like her opponent; that she doesn’t have an advanced degree but is “just like you” and asserts that her lack of accomplishment either educationally or in life in general makes her the most qualified person for the senate seat from Delaware. When did the great accomplishment of graduating from college and going on to graduate school become a bad thing? It used to be that it was a great pride of America that these things could happen; and that the people that did the work and made the sacrifice to earn those advanced degrees were somehow special, and were to be emulated. But, the repubs have made it an asset to be the least educated, least capable, and least self-aware of any of the candidates…and their followers howl with derision at anyone who can think and make them think. I think what this is going to guarantee as the years pass is that we get people elected that truly don’t believe that we need to support education, that it is not really important for the “Real Americans” and will accelerate our slide to second class nation status.

But, this doesn’t need to happen, we can ensure that we continue to go forward as a nation by finding the smart people to elect, that have shown that they have the toughness to get into the trenches to fight for a better America…who won’t quit when the going gets tough (yep, that’s for you Sister Sarah) and who realizes that compromise is what makes a democracy work; not slash and burn…geez…