On one of the blogs I like to read for sheer masochistic mental anguish, the mostly male commenters are arguing about the nature of intelligence. They can’t agree what an “intellectual” is, but they know they don’t like it. They’re also going on about Blacks being “cunning” rather than intelligent.

I can’t imagine women having this sort of argument. It’s too silly on the one hand, and too racist on the other. Who gives a shit? Women know what intelligence is and they don’t pretend not to. No wonder men don’t want to talk to us; we can’t take this kind of pompous pissing contest seriously.

Elsewhere, the ever-delightful Mr. Duff, who likes to annoy my commenters, has called them “retards” and “nobodies” in a rant (about intellectuals) on his own blog. Retards, good. We’re Retards. But “nobodies?” What kind of an adult man wants to obsess over the definition of Intellectual and then call a group of people Nobodies?

Men! They are always so confused about what to take seriously. And yet, they buy Extenze. Have we all seen the commercials where a dazed looking woman promises that Extenze will make “that certain part of a man” bigger? The first time I saw it, I yelled “What, his ego?” Which I thought was a really good joke, even though my husband failed to crack a smile.

Now there’s a new Extenze commercial where a married couple sits together looking smug and self-congratulatory. The man says something like he thought is would be “fun” to be “bigger.” The woman agrees suggestively that it WAS “fun.”

Hahaha! What’s wrong with men, I mean people?? A bigger dick is not the answer. I almost hate to break the news, know what I mean? But while looking for Extenze, I just came upon a website called Penis Enlargement Planet. And it’s about penis enlargement. What a waste of a great domain name!

The sillyness of men can be mind-boggling or endearing, depending on the size of their penis. JUST KIDDING! It can also be really frustrating. Take this simple quiz:

Person A asks Person B why they are mad. Person B denies being mad. Person A asks again. Person B states angrily that they weren’t mad, but now they are.

Who is the man, Person A or Person B?

Two new collections of essays by George Orwell are as relevant today as when he wrote them. In Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (1946) he connects degraded language with the decline of contemporary culture and political thought. He also says this:

“All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.”

Keeping that in mind, an important essay by Mark Lilla in the Wall Street Journal outlines the history of “Populist Chic”   and what it means for the conservative intellectual tradition. He describes how a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into “a disdain for the educated class as a whole.”   He laments that the result of this movement was the promotion “of a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against.”

On the same track is an op-ed in the New York Times today called “Obama and the War on Brains.” Nicholas Kristof reminds us that the second most remarkable thing about Obama’s election “is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.”

Yeah, baby! That’s what I’m talking about. Let’s make stupidity a sin instead of celebrating it. Eight years of W have been more than enough. People who don’t read newspapers and scoff at science should know enough to be ashamed of themselves.

We need to raise the tone! We need to insist that people think and read and be proud of their vocabularies instead of being afraid to sound elitist. America is the only country I know of where “real people” means simpletons. We need to respect intellectuals instead of regarding them as suspect.

Today my friend Mark was visiting from Connecticut and he tried to describe how his hatred of Sarah Palin wasn’t just partisan but personal. That’s the issue that has set many of us apart from other Democrats and liberals: We fucking hate her and we still do! I think that above all, it’s the proud stupidity that she wears like a crown. Today in an interview at her home, while cooking up some moose, she said this:

“Regarding information regarding my record, that its now out there much of it that was based on misinformation was a very, very frustrating thing to have to go through when the record was never corrected.”

Huh? Say again, in English?

Asked to be specific about the misinformation, she said…..

“Some of the goofy things like who was Trig’s mom. Well, I’m Trig’s mom (raises her hand) and do you want to see my medical records to prove that?”

Hahahahaha! YES, YOU MORON, we do!   Until she does, I guess I’m doomed to keep hating her and writing about it.   Just not all the time.