Run Sarah Run and the Cambodian Genocide

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts calls it in today's column. He really wants Sarah Palin to run for -- and win -- the Rethug nomination for prez in 2012.

He's serious about it:

Maybe you figure I think you'd be a weak candidate who would pave the way for President Obama's easy re-election.
That's not it. No, I want you to run because I believe a Palin candidacy would force upon this country a desperately needed moment of truth. It would require us to finally decide what kind of America we want to be.
Mrs. Palin, you are an avatar of the shameless hypocrisy and cognitive disconnection that have driven our politics for the last decade, a process of stupidification creeping like kudzu over our national life.
As Exhibit A, consider your recent speech at a so-called "tea party'' event, wherein you dismissed the president as a ``charismatic guy with a teleprompter.'' Bad enough you imply that teleprompter use is the mark of an insubstantial man, even though you and every other major politician uses them. But what made the comment truly jaw-dropping is that even as you spoke, you had penned on your left palm, clearly visible, a series of crib notes.
Mrs. Palin, if Obama is an idiot for reading a prepared speech off a teleprompter, what are you for reading notes you've inked on your hand like a school kid who failed to study for the big test?
In the Fox interview, you scored Obama for supposedly expecting Americans to "sit down and shut up'' and accept his policies. But when asked when the president has ever said that, you couldn't answer. Obama, you sputtered, has just been condescending with his "general persona.''
I found that a telling moment. See, ultimately what you represent is not conservatism. Heck, I suspect that somewhere, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan are spinning like helicopter rotors at the very idea.
No, you represent the latest iteration of an anti-intellectualism that periodically rises in the American character. There is, historically and persistently, a belief in us that y'all just can't trust nobody who acts too smart or talks too good -- in other words, somebody whose "general persona'' indicates they may have once cracked a book or had a thought. Americans tend to believe common sense the exclusive province of humble folks without sheepskins on the wall or big words in their vocabularies.

It's that anti-intellectual strain in the American psyche that elbows its way to the front every now and then and turns professors into targets and smart people into defensive-posture hunkering.

It's part of the same mindset that when carried to its logical extreme caused Pol Pot to "cleanse" Cambodia of everyone who did not have honest calluses on his hands. In other words, the entire intellegentsia class was pretty much wiped out in the Cambodian genocide.

Could it happen here? Yeah I think so. I think it actually wouldn't take much to whip a mob of armed teabaggers into a lynching frenzy, to get them to storm the universities with torches and pitchforks. They are just that stupid and malleable.

So back to Leonard Pitts. There's an old saying, Leonard: Be careful what you ask for, because you might just get it...