“And these are the idiots we want to weigh in on the minutia of health care policy? Please, this country is like a college chick after two Long Island Iced Teas: we can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget town halls, and replace them with study halls. There’s a lot of populist anger directed towards Washington, but you know who concerned citizens should be most angry at? Their fellow citizens. ‘Inside the beltway’ thinking may be wrong, but at least it’s thinking, which is more than you can say for what’s going on outside the beltway.”–Bill Maher’s assessment of ordinary Americans

In a diatribe at Huffingtonpost.com, intellectual “giant” Bill Maher has succinctly described the way most liberals view ordinary Americans: a bunch of hapless idiots who need to be told what to do by their intellectual superiors.

Mr. Maher knows he’s an elitist for saying so, and that makes him proud: “And if you want to call me an elitist for this, I say thank you. Yes, I want decisions made by an elite group of people who know what they’re talking about. That means Obama budget director Peter Orszag, not Sarah Palin.”

You’re not an elitist, Bill. You’re an arrogant ass.

Unfortunately, you’re far from alone. Like so many others in this country who bemoan the lack of intellectual prowess possessed by the average American, you believe anyone who isn’t “book smart” is an idiot who has no business weighing on the future of America. Hmm. I wonder if you felt that way last November when those same idiots elected Barack Obama and a Democratic majority to Congress. I’d be willing to bet you thought they were brilliant then, if only for a fleeting moment.

But let’s take a look at where our best and brightest, our Ivy League wunderkinds, and our “inside the Beltway” types have taken us.

It wasn’t the American people who voted to go to war in Iraq. It was Congress, by over a two thirds majority in both Houses (yup, I know there’s two). It is also our luminaries in Congress who have also managed to spend us into eleven trillion dollar sinkhole with no end in sight–which might explain why the “morons” are getting somewhat agitated. Unlike the liberal elites who engage in war games to get their children into the “right” kindergarten, these folks worry that their own children, mini-morons that they may be, will be saddled a bleak, socialist future.

That would be the very same socialism which has failed throughout the course of history, something which apparently eludes the intellectual giants who are pushing it here.

Does stubborn also equal stupid, Bill?

And how about that economy? It wasn’t the dopes who ran Wall Street into the ground, collapsed the housing industry or bankrupted the car companies. It was our college-educated elitists in finance, Congress and business who did that. Main Street America, aka Moron-ville, got taken along for the ride.

It isn’t ordinary Americans who pass legislation without reading it, spend money we don’t have, or decide they have an inherent right to tell other people how to live–even as many of their own lives are revealed to be mired in corruption, extra-marital affairs, cheating on their taxes, and “do as I say not as I do” hypocrisy.

You know what, Bill? I’ve been to Manhattan cocktail parties and Hell’s Angel bash-fests. I’ll take the beer guzzlers over the chardonnay sippers every day of the week. Same for salt-of-the-earth common sense over self-aggrandizing psycho-babble. I’ll take the folks I know wouldn’t soil their skivvies in a foxhole versus the ones who would, even as they wring their hands wondering “why our enemies hate us.”

The people who built this country, sustained it, and have friends and relatives who died for it, are unworthy to “weigh in” on the healthcare debacle? Shame on you, Bill. And shame on all the cowardly representatives who won’t show up to town hall meetings and face them. You’re all cut from the same holier-than-thou, elitist cloth, the same self-righteous blow hards who suddenly decided that dissent, which you said was the “highest form of patriotism” when you were the dissenters is now “idiotic.”

You can dish it out, but you can’t take it?

No surprise there. Better to dismiss ordinary Americans as idiots than debate them. Better to comfort yourselves with “right wing conspiracy” theories than admit you might not own the franchise on superior wisdom. Better to completely dismiss the innate goodness and understanding of the American people than to entertain the thought that they might know more about life than a bunch of insulated, educated snarks who’ve never gotten their hands dirty.

Small people with giant egos like you are running this country into the ground, Bill. We “cavemen” don’t like it. We won’t be backing down anytime soon.

Count on it.

atahlert@comcast.net

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