Dumb and Dumber: Trump, Palin and the Celebration of Stupidity in U.S. Politics @alternet:
"Every time we get GOP nonsense, someone calls it out. But so far, calling out the stupidity and laughing at it, isn’t hurting Trump or Palin. It doesn’t hurt because over time we have watched the GOP become dominated by the idea that truth, reason, and critical thinking are a liberal agenda designed to destroy our nation’s core values. Here’s the irony though. Intelligence is actually a core value of U.S. politics, or at least it used to be. Elvin Lim has found that over time our political rhetoric has relentlessly declined. In fact, he notes a nosedive in intelligence in public speech since the founding fathers. President George Washington’s “Farewell Address” in 1796 was written at graduate-degree levels: Grade 17.9, while President Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” in 1863 was at an 11th-grade level. Now we have Trump coming in at fourth grade. I’m guessing Palin doesn’t even rate that high. It seems that the only way to understand Trump and Palin is to Tase not only the part of the brain that understands sentence structure, but also the part that understands anything at all."
