Idiot Du Jour: Brett Stephens

Wow. You'd think that the WSJ op-ed page couldn't get any worse, wouldn't you?

Well, you'd be wrong.

The wingnuts hate Obama. Oh yes they do. He may very well be, as you may recall and according to them, the Antichrist.

Now, you'd think that even those who are blinded by their Obama hatred would have to admit a few things, among them that the guy is smart. Misguided, they might say...the crazier among them might even say that he's evil. But there's really no denying his intelligence. But that's exactly what this Brett Stephens does deny. Obama, he asserts, just "isn't very bright."

Now, Bush wasn't the sharpest billiard ball on the table, so I'd be interested to see whether Mr. Stephens thought that fact worth mentioning...just as a touchstone for the conversation...  Obama is clearly significantly brighter than Bush...so you'd think Bush's demonstrated lack of smarts might warrant a comment from Stephens. Of course it didn't--I don't even need to take the ten seconds to Google it to know that. 

Even someone fairly dim, if underanged by partisan tribalism, should be able to tell that Obama is a smart fellow. So Mr. Stephens is either an idiot, or he is blinded by partisan antipathy...or he's just insulting the president because he doesn't like him. These things usually come mixed together, so that's why I'm going to guess: a stew of stupidity, partisanship, and venom. Congratulations, Mr. Stephens, a trifecta!

My guess would be that the desire to insult is a fairly substantial component here. Kant tells us that the willingness to bet is the measure of belief. So here's a little experiment to test that hypothesis: suppose Stephens's life depended on a bet on the proposition Barack Obama is intelligent. Which way do you think Stephens would bet? Yeah, that's what I think, too.

Here's a slightly (but only slightly) more practical bet. I'm willing to bet Stephens on the results of an Obama IQ test. For every point Obama comes in under the average, I give Stephens $100--or, rather, if he likes, $1000. For every point the president comes in over the average, Stephens gives me a like amount. Of course there's basically no chance of the president taking the time to take such a test...but I'd be willing--in fact, damn eager--to make such a bet. The same would obviously not be true of Mr. Stephens. He would, obviously, avoid such a bet like the plague. Which would show what we already know--that he doesn't believe what he writes. That is, that it was little more than an insult.

In case the mere details of the bet described above are not congenial to Mr. Stephens, we could set the mark not at an IQ of 100, but, hell, let's say at 115--nobody can say that people with IQs of 115 are "not very bright." Does anybody really think that the president's IQ is going to come in under 130 or so? No, they do not.

Mr. Stephens is obviously no rocket scientist, but my guess is that he's not dumb enough to believe what he writes in the WSJ. It's just an insult, and just one more example of the derangement of the American right. Hatred and contempt for Obama--a pretty fair president by historical standards, and a man who stands head and shoulders above the last Republican occupant of the White House--has driven them to say flat-out stupid things. Stephens's screed is just a small drop dropped into the right-wing fever swamps.