Welcome to the War on Intelligence

Who went to Harvard? This guy! (Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.)

Yesterday, a Harvard Crimson editorial attacked most likely presidential candidate Mitt Romney for yet again undermining his own education in attempt to discredit President Obama by blaming his so-called ineptitude to his having “spent too much time at Harvard.” Which is utterly ridiculous as we all know, because, well, Romney has more degrees from the school than Obama … and it’s Harvard. The last time I checked it was still one of, if not the nation’s top institution, a place children grow up dreaming of attending — before high school mediocrity takes hold.

So is Romney serious in his hypocrisy? How can he honestly continuously berate the President for being academically adept — for attending a school where he himself spent four years and later sent his own children? I asked Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe the same question for our own article on the topic, and his response is enough to scare the pants off any degree-toting intellectual: The Republican Party is so desperate to take down the President, so desperate for the support of “the 99 percent,” that they’ll say literally anything. And they can get away with it because their audience — the American people — will easily forgo all rationality since they’re not interested in the truth. For many, they’re interested only in conservative agendas.

Scared yet? You should be. As it was laid out in the Crimson:

“It speaks to the power of the extreme right in today’s Republican party that trash-talking academic achievement is de rigeur even for candidates who hail from Massachusetts, received two Harvard degrees, and are supposedly members of the Republican establishment. This is not simply anti-elitism, but anti-intellectualism. In an age when the nation’s problems are increasingly complex, requiring the kind of expertise that a good education provides, we cannot afford to mock those who pursue one.”