Why Intellectuals infuriate me

They write drivel like this:

Ordinary folks might be unable to marshal facts and figures to counter such ludicrous claims, but they know bullshit when they see it. This has two effects on them: One, they feel profoundly disempowered watching their leaders deploy their smarts not on their behalf but against them. And two, since they can’t become experts and academics, they resist by retreating into their own simple certitudes drawn from folk wisdom, faith and founding principles. Indeed, Sarah Palin is as much Barack Obama’s gift to America as she is John McCain’s.

The great political divide right now is not between eggheads and blockheads, as Maureen Dowd puts it, or intellectualism and stupidity, as other self-serving liberal pundits sneer. It is between two types of activism: an irresponsible, pseudo-intellectual one and a retrograde, folksy one.

Look, I have as many intellectual bona fides as anyone, and more than most.  And this simply infuriates me.  It assumes that only an intellectual is fit to serve as President.  Not only is that entirely unoriginal (dating back to Plato's Republic), but it's been known for decades that this is bollox of the first order.

And the author - Reason's Shikha Dalmia - clearly has absolutely no idea about this, while she drones on and on about how Republicans are dim witted, anti-intellectual bumpkins too stupid to understand what's going on:

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann—women with better hairdos than heads ...

Republican intellectual defensiveness has hardened into intellectual goofiness. No longer is stupidity a disqualification, even for the highest office in the land. Palin, in fact, has turned her lack of intellectual talent into her biggest asset, like Snooki on “Jersey Shore.” ...

I've said before that I don't know if Palin would be a good president, but (a) it's hard to see her as worse than Obama, (b) she's clearly less loopy that Joe Biden, who sits today a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, and (c) Palin is changing politics in the country is a way that Dalmia simply can't seem to comprehend.

But the kicker is that Ms. Dalmia is entirely happy to lurch into a blanket condemnation of the majority of this country for being unthinking, while presenting her very own unthinking bona fides on display for us here.  And not just the examples here - she serves up one herself:

The great hope from Obama was that he would be different. That his thoughtful, professorial demeanor would prompt him to look for policies that worked—not push a preconceived agenda. In fact, when he took office, I hoped that he would be an “empirical president” who dispassionately considered the evidence from all sides before making decisions.

Huh?  What sort of idiot expected this?  The Shikha Dalmia sort of idiot, that's who.  You know, the type that still doesn't get it that intellectuals do not - and should not - have the trust of the majority of Americans, because they keep screwing up.  Dalmia points this out in her article, and still complains that Americans are doing this.

She could have done some honest self-analysis.  Instead, she looks at who's in the Intellectual in-group, and sneers at thom she's placed in the Intellectual out-group.  That's one righteous display of brain power, right there.

Hey Ms. Dalmia - Sitting Bull called.  He wants his Tribal Thinking back.

That's why I don't like to hang with Intellectuals very much anymore.  Not only are they mostly stupid, they combine unthinking self-unawareness with viciousness in equal measures.  It's too much drivel for me to stomach.

I'd like a higher caliber drivel, please.