Ignorance is Bad! No More Funding for Political Science Research?

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Here's another wonderful example of Republicans trying to keep the masses ignorant because stupid people win them elections.  They lie, cheat, and exagerate their way to power knowing that as long as they demonize school, research, faculty, intellectualism, and all smart people as elitist, out of touch, or "liberal" the ignorant masses will become more ignorant, and never question their rediculous policies.

Let me break that down for you into a simple cycle.

Smart people overwhelmingly vote for liberal policies

Republicans want to win votes

Republicans need to find a way to keep people from being smart:

Step 1 - Demonize faculty for "liberal bias"

Step 2 - Claim higher education as "indocrinating students"

Step 3 - Encourage "parent's rights" to force the school to teach ignorance (intelligent design, abstinence only, etc.)

Step 4 - Bully academia into respecting their "opinions" as legitimate theory

What Happens: Parents and children make bad choices about where to go to school, IF they will go to school, and what they learn.  Critical thinking is undermined.  Parents are allowed to indocrinate their children at home AND in the school house.  Schools are crippled from encouraging real learning and forced to teach conservative, christian, ignorant propaganda.

Cycle: These indocrinated students (believing that education is bad) will then buy into the cycle and continue to supress critical thinking in their children, friends, co-workers, spouses, employees, etc.

Result: These undereducated people will lack the intellectual capacity to critically analyze party platforms and policies and will dogmatically vote Republican...

All due respect to Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), but there is a HUGE difference between research on political science and political commentary and punditry. On the one hand, you have critical research, original data, and a deep, thorough process that creates new, unique knowledge that is empirically driven and vigorously reviewed for validity and reliability by peers and professionals in the field. On the other, you have loud mouth commentators who mistake their own opinion for fact, and believe that validity and reliability come from ratings and the number of people who watch their show.Just another example of republicans trying to suppress critical thinking and education.

Common Sense