"She Celebrates Ignorance"

David Brooks' devastating assessment of Sarah Palin, delivered at an event for The Atlantic in New York on Monday, echoes an email I received from a prominent Republican party professional in response to Gov. Palin's debate performance last week. His words Here's the email*:

Fascinating.

She really is what Bush pretends to be -- she 's a true anti-intellectual. She's has this very Pentecostal view of the world. We don't need to study the Bible, we don't need ministers, we can just feel the spirit and let the spirit speak through us. It's this classically Alaskan value system that places experience over all other values. I know what mothers need because I am a mother.

We don't need to read or even learn because that just fills our heads with confusing ideas and facts and figures. We feel.

Bush plays at this anti-elite stuff but he's Harvard/Yale/Andover, all of that. She is really a celebration of a glorious know-nothingness that is truly dangerous....

She's terrifying and represents a streak of the Republican party that is a permanent minority. She will not play well with suburban women in Montgomery County [OH]. They want their kids to go to good schools and college. Palin basically says that isn't necessary. You can just speak plainly from the heart and that's good enough. But that's how you end up a fish picker from Alaska.

It's not that she is an idiot that bothers me. It's that she celebrates non-learning and anti-knowledge. She celebrates ignorance.

Terrifying.

* NOTE: Just to clarify, the block quote above is from a prominent Republican professional, not David Brooks. What Brooks said in New York can be found via the hyperlink.