Salon has published an important piece urging our nation’s Thought Leaders to stop pretending Senator Ted Cruz is an intelligent person. Read all 1,200 words of it if you insist, but the upshot, essentially, is that being smart and holding conservative political views are mutually exclusive.
On the other hand, it wouldn’t require much editing to rewrite the piece in a way that would condemn the intellect of another alleged genius, Barack Obama, and pretty much every Democrat who might run for president in 2016.
For example, Salon writer (and presumed Obama superfan) Nathan Robinson argues that the "preexisting consensus" about Cruz—that despite his moral failings as a Republican, he does possess a "sophisticated mind"—is wrong because of Cruz’s tendency to speak in "platitudinous drivel" and engage in "performance art."
Unlike Obama, obviously, who historians have already declared "the smartest guy ever to become President." Obama is "cerebral," has written two memoirs, and received his undergraduate degree at an Ivy League institution only slightly less prestigious than Cruz's alma mater. He probably watches The Colbert Report and "gets" all the subtle, intellectual jokes. Nothing platitudinous about "Hope and Change," or "Economic Patriotism."
If Cruz was really a genius, Robinson asks, would he have "alienated all of his colleagues" in the Senate? You know, just like President Obama has alienated his Democratic allies in Congress, who are unimpressed by his scholarly aloofness.
Cruz is a gigantic liar, too, and doesn’t even have any political successes to his name, so he’s clearly an idiot. Unlike Obama, whose one transformative accomplishment (Obamacare) suffered a disastrous rollout and would never have passed in the first place if voters hadn’t believed the gigantic lie—"You can keep your plan"—the president repeated ad nauseum.
Consider the following passage from Robinson’s piece, which has been reproduced almost verbatim, but with Cruz’s name replaced with Obama’s:
Any definition of intelligence is destined to be highly contestable. Yet it is hard to imagine a plausible one that does not include large measures of critical thinking and self-scrutiny. As Bertrand Russell put it, it’s always a central problem that "the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." Intelligence necessitates doubt, for doubt is the origin of wisdom. One whose mind is clamped shut cannot be intelligent, and yet Barack Obama does not in his life ever seem to have taken on board a single challenge to his worldview.
In fact, the consistent overgenerous assessment of Obama’s brains may stem from a deeper problem with the values of the elite legal community. If Newt Gingrich is "a stupid person’s idea of what a smart person looks like," Barack Obama is a lawyer’s idea of what a smart person looks like . . . But success in the legal world does not depend on common sense. Ambition and confidence can more than make up for it. Law schools pose as Socratic institutions, where preconceptions are left in tatters on the lecture-room floor, but in practice they reward sparring ability far more than reflection and careful scholarliness (the haphazard, un-peer-reviewed world of law journals [such as the Harvard Law Review] can attest to the legal academy’s prioritization of argumentative formalism over a sober-minded quest for enlightenment). A person with one or two core principles, and a ruthless willingness to bend any truth that gets in the way, can do very well for himself at law school. Certainly, this requires skill. But it would be a sad day for the progress of human knowledge if we called it intelligence. . .
The key is to admit what is obvious from a few minutes of listening to him. The man is arrogant, but he doesn’t actually seem very smart.
Did you even notice the difference?
More importantly, we should all be asking ourselves: Is it racist to publicly question the intelligence of a prominent Hispanic politician?
I think we all know the answer.