More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
This switch accomplished two goals, invoking the memory of Reagan’s nickname for the Soviet Union, the Evil Empire; and blowing a dog whistle to let Bush’s evangelical base know that he’d been chosen for this mission by God, not just by Sandra Day O’Connor.
Bush’s arguments for war with Saddam would continue to echo the tactics of Ronald Reagan, who, when he didn’t have facts to support his claims, would make shit up.
Though he’d certainly agree with Reagan that “facts are stupid things,” Bush thought nuance was even stupider.
I don’t want a president who’s just like me. I’m pretty sure I’d suck at the job. I want a president to be better than I am: smarter, braver, calmer, and more patient. When a country faces war, economic collapse, or contagion, I’m not sure it’s Miller Time.
By his final year in office, his brand had mutated from lack of studiousness to utter thickness.
Samuel L. Jackson, who’d backed Obama in both his presidential bids, accused him of “promoting mediocrity” by sounding less educated than he was. “[S]top trying to ‘relate,’ ” Jackson said. “Be a leader. Be fucking presidential. Look, I grew up in a society where I could say ‘It ain’t’ or ‘What it be’ to my friends. But when I’m out presenting myself to the world as me, who graduated from college, who had family who cared about me, who has a well-read background, I fucking conjugate.” When the star of Snakes on a Plane accuses you of dumbing things down, attention must be paid.
according to the transitive property of stupidity,
With her toxic brew of ignorance and grievance, Sarah Palin was the gateway ignoramus who led to Donald Trump.
ineluctable
Barnes said he was “struck by how smart Palin was, and how unusually confident. Maybe because she had been a beauty queen, and a star athlete, and succeeded at almost everything she had done.”
No Republican vice presidential prospect had released such crazy-making pheromones since Dan Quayle.
If Palin’s failure to stay at one college barely long enough to unpack her toothbrush suggested a certain flightiness, her former aide John Bitney confirmed that assessment: “She has a remarkably short attention span.”
Culvahouse offered this optimistic assessment of Palin’s preparedness to be president: “She will not be ready on January 20, but she has the smarts to get there.”
Palin believed that the British armed forces were under the command of the Queen. She didn’t know the difference between England and the United Kingdom, and had never heard of Margaret Thatcher.X
She was also shaky when it came to a former British colony, the United States of America.
The lesson here: when someone calls you “a quick study,” you don’t know shit.
They started with the Spanish Civil War, then moved on to World War I,
The Spanish Civil War was after WWi.
Because so many of Palin’s responses avoided being wrong by being incomprehensible, the McCain team felt that she had emerged relatively unscathed.
As Dubya and Reagan both showed, if you don’t have facts to support your case, fear and hate are handy substitutes.
On November 4, 2008, Obama and Biden clobbered the McCain-Palin ticket. Three years later, McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, expressed remorse about choosing the VP candidate he’d once called “a star.” “I think that she helped usher in an era of know-nothingness and mainstreamed it in the Republican Party to the detriment of the conservative movement,” he said. “And I think her nomination trivialized American politics, and had a lot of results that I’m not particularly comfortable with… [I]t was a mistake.”
Faced with the daunting challenge of saying something more offensive than “legitimate rape,” Mourdock seized the hold-my-beer moment.
Palin, demonstrating her usual fear of missing out on any controversy that could help draw attention to herself,
Meghan McCain was moved to call Bachmann “the thinking man’s Sarah Palin.” Asked to explain her reasoning, McCain responded, “She’s more smarter.”
3
there’s still some debate about whether Trump is dumb or smart. On one side are people with firsthand knowledge of Trump. On the other is Trump.
So: on the subject of Trump’s knowledge, there appears to be a stark difference of opinion between Trump and people who aren’t Trump.
Trump’s aversion to reading the work of non–Third Reich authors posed a challenge to those at the White House charged with keeping him semi-informed.
When it comes to history, Trump’s most common errors involve (1) when events happened, and (2) what happened.
Having reviewed Trump’s ignorance about spelling, reading, math, science, history, and geography, we should wrap up this investigation by considering his grasp of religion.
In a 2017 meeting with two Presbyterian pastors, he seemed confused about whether Presbyterians were Christians. Incidentally, he was raised Presbyterian.
Trump’s appeal comes into clearer focus if you think of him as a personality from professional wrestling—which,
When Trump was elected, many bemoaned our celebrity-obsessed culture,
Trump observed, “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.”
Convinced, like Perot, that the best person to run a large, complicated government was someone with no experience doing so, Ventura
For his troubles, Buchanan was given a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention, which he used to declare a “cultural war.” (Molly Ivins famously said his speech “probably sounded better in the original German.”)
Daniel Boorstin described in his 1961 book, The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream.
We don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop, and it’s got to stop fast.” The message was clear: we don’t know what’s happening, but it’s got to stop!
Tea Party gasbag Ted Cruz
The logic of Quayle’s answer was Palinesque: If Americans were looking for someone less qualified than Clinton, Trump was more qualified at being unqualified.
the White House initiated a strategy that adviser Steve Bannon called “flooding the zone with shit.”
Under Reagan, facts were “stupid things”; under Bush, facts were the silly obsession of “the reality-based community.” Conway was taking the rebranding of facts into a whole new dimension.
A quick way to improve education would be to identify the schools Tuberville attended and raze them.
that ultimate specimen of Florida Man, Representative Matt Gaetz.
Call it a rookie mistake, but someone should have told Miller that, when you start a sentence with “Hitler was right,” it’s almost impossible to stick the landing.
Knowing when and when not to praise Hitler can be tricky.
the Age of Ignorance has repeatedly enacted a dark principle: in the absence of knowledge, violence fills the void.
Actually, the minute you get into an argument online, the other side automatically wins, because you’re expending energy that could have been applied to political activities that are productive and not just symbolic.
knowledge is only valuable if we take action to oust our current crop of dunces.
“I really started feeling that if we are going to save our democracy, we all really need to work, to do hard things.”
dial back our day-to-day surveillance of national politics, roll up our sleeves, and get to work on the local level.
