This is Why I Can't Vote Republican

From the New York Times, on the future of Sarah Palin:

Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, a conservative group, called it a “top order of business” to determine Ms. Palin’s future role. “Conservatives have been looking for leadership, and she has proven that she can electrify the grass roots like few people have in the last 20 years,” Mr. Bozell said. “No matter what she decides to do, there will be a small mother lode of financial support behind her.”

The Democrats are running a candidate with an impressive intellect, a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, who is so articulate that the humorists at Saturday Night Live still haven’t figured an effective way to make fun of him. Even conservatives are impressed by how well he’s run his campaign.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are running a couple of intellectual lightweights who are so easy to parody that even I can totter around like a mental patient saying “my friends” or pull out a snippet of halfway decent Palin-speak sometimes. You betcha. Then you have Republicans saying things like the remark quoted above, conflating “leadership” with the ability to “electrify the grass roots” and raise “a small mother lode of financial support.” Who are these people? Could they be more transparent about their desire to have power even at the cost of putting idiotic figureheads in the Oval Office, destroying our national respect at home and abroad, and systematically dumbing down our social discourse?

When was the last time Republicans ran a candidate who had some intellectual heft or at least respectability? Twenty years ago? Thirty years ago? Maybe. But then Alan Greenspan wrote in his recent book that Richard Nixon was hands-down the smartest president he ever worked with, so maybe a wicked-smart Republican is not what the world needs.

If the Republicans could run somebody with the intellectual credentials, articulation, and rhetorical strength of Barack Obama, on a solid conservative platform without all the “moral” issues that have plagued the Republican party for the last thirty-five years, since Roe v. Wade, then I would probably vote for him or her. But who are they looking at? Sarah Palin. Ridiculous.