To try to break the cycle of the last few pages of ridiculousness, I heard the author of this New York Times piece on NPR earlier this week, and it was a really interesting segment.
Basically, the GOP has been a lot of intelligent, educated people playing down their worldly ways in order to cater to the "average Joe," going against intellectualism and elitism.
After decades of that, finally they have a candidate that embodies all of this. He's not educated in the affairs of the world, the affairs of the country, he has no real grasp of how politics work at all. The GOP finally has their actual anti-intellectual candidate.
The rise of Trump is essentially their own fault for celebrating feeling over fact, emotion over education.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/op...ald-trump.html
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The Republican embrace of anti-intellectualism was, to a large extent, a put-on. At least until now.
Eisenhower may have played the part of an amiable duffer, but he may have been the best prepared president we have ever had — a five-star general with an unparalleled knowledge of national security affairs. When he resorted to gobbledy#### in public, it was in order to preserve his political room to maneuver. Reagan may have come across as a dumb thespian, but he spent decades honing his views on public policy and writing his own speeches. Nixon may have burned with resentment of “Harvard men,” but he turned over foreign policy and domestic policy to two Harvard professors, Henry A. Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, while his own knowledge of foreign affairs was second only to Ike’s.
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The trend has now culminated in the nomination of Donald J. Trump, a presidential candidate who truly is the know-nothing his Republican predecessors only pretended to be.
Mr. Trump doesn’t know the difference between the Quds Force and the Kurds. He can’t identify the nuclear triad, the American strategic nuclear arsenal’s delivery system. He had never heard of Brexit until a few weeks before the vote. He thinks the Constitution has 12 Articles rather than seven. He uses the vocabulary of a fifth grader. Most damning of all, he traffics in off-the-wall conspiracy theories by insinuating that President Obama was born in Kenya and that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination. It is hardly surprising to read Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter for Mr. Trump’s best seller “The Art of the Deal,” say, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.”
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