Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [127]
Sarah Palin was ideal for the middlebrow obsessions of people on the left. Professional atheist Sam Harris complained in Newsweek that Palin “didn’t have a passport until last year.”26 Huffington Post editor Roy Sekoff—who went to a single mediocre college—sneered about “the six colleges that she attended.”27 Keith Olbermann thinks he’s gotten a great dig in at Palin when he compulsively suggests a dinner with her would involve “a nice glass of Pinot Grigio or Mountain Dew.”28
This is Real Housewives snobbery—white trash acting as if they’re jetsetters. Maybe it’s true that red-staters don’t travel as much as blue-staters do. At least we manage not to spoil our ballots as often as Democratic voters do. One also can’t help noticing that red-staters aren’t terrified of literacy tests, as the Democrats are.
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (musical theater major, Syracuse University) cannot write a script without a moment when some character asks, “Why are people resented because they are more intelligent?” Sorkin’s West Wing president, Josiah Bartlet, was forced to play down his brilliance, until finally one of his advisers tells him, “I’m telling you, be the smartest kid in your class. Be the reason why your father hated you. Make this an election about smart and stupid, about engaged and not, qualified and not.”
As Sorkin explained his motive for that scintillating speech, “It was frustrating watching Gore try so hard not to appear smart in the debates—why not just say, ‘Here’s my f—ing résumé, what do you got?’ ”29
What we “got,” evidently, is better word comprehension than Sorkin. Two years earlier, the Washington Post had reported that, after Gore got into Harvard, helped by his prominent senator father (unlike George W. Bush, who got into Yale when his father was an obscure congressman), he ranked in the bottom fifth of the class for his first two years. In his sophomore year, “Gore’s grades were lower than any semester recorded on Bush’s transcript from Yale.”30 Gore went on to Divinity School, where he failed five of eight classes before dropping out. As Gore was failing out of Divinity School, Bush was earning his MBA from Harvard. Maybe that’s why Gore didn’t want to bring up the subject of educational achievement by saying, “Here’s my f—ing résumé, what do you got?”
No matter what their own credentials, liberals are always dying to blurt out, “I’m smarter than you!” Normal people aren’t driven by what other people think of them. They don’t spend every waking moment thinking, “How do I get this person to acknowledge my intellectual gifts?” Normal people, thankfully, are not liberals.
The media so lost their composure with Sarah Palin that they slipped and gave away their contempt for people who live in places they would never visit and know nothing about. They simply forgot themselves. Noticeably, no Democratic politicians ever attacked Palin the way the media did. Politicians are well aware that there are a lot more people in the country like Sarah Palin than there are like Frank Rich.
Naturally, the people most ostentatiously bothered by Sarah Palin’s purported idiocy were the most aggressive social climbers. Their pinup is Keith Olbermann, who was practicing radio at age six, while other boys were learning how to throw things and prevent girls from beating them up. Keith neurotically cites his nonexistent “Ivy League education” while ridiculing others for their stupidity.
When he was still employed at MSNBC, Keith had a four-page typewritten sheet taped to the outside of his office door titled “People Who Watch This Show,” followed by a list of low-level celebrities. He is the sort of person who would write Mensa to argue that he should be admitted (and misspell “Mensa”). Now his fans