The South Dakota GOP, in support of Kristi Noem, a representative from that state, has released an ad enumerating the many, many reasons that her opponent Matt Varilek is untrustworthy. They are as follows:
- Earned TWO master’s degrees — who needs that much education?
- Studied something called “the environment,” clearly code for “communism.”
- Lived in or visited several places that are not South Dakota.
- Believes in global warming.
- Corn dogs.
Kristi Noem, by contrast, had the integrity to not finish college, since she had to raise a farm and manage a family and didn’t have time for fancy lectures about imaginary global warming from liberal homosexuals. (UPDATE: I should have made it clearer that Noem says she left college because she had to manage the farm after her father died. This ad is idiotic but it’s not fair for me to make it look like anti-intellectualism made her shun education. That’s the South Dakota GOP’s job, clearly.)
Seriously, you have to watch this ad to believe the depth of anti-intellectualism and anti-environmentalism at work here. The voiceover literally just reads off Varilek’s impressive resume — got two postgraduate degrees, studied at Cambridge, spoke at a U.N. global warming summit — but in a tone of voice that suggests Varilek achieved all this while smearing his face with the blood of aborted puppies.
Meanwhile, Noem’s achievements include receiving an award from the South Dakota Soybean Association, but at least she doesn’t know anything about how soybeans work! I’m actually surprised the ad missed an opportunity to claim that while Noem did attend college, she only went because it was a requirement of her title as South Dakota Snow Queen. Surely, with a constituency that thinks “attending U.N. summits” and “leaving the state occasionally” are liabilities in a politician, that tidbit ought to make her a shoo-in.
