Noted conservative Ben Stein wrote an editorial column for the Alaska Dispatch recently. To say he criticized Joe Miller is putting it a bit lightly. He calls Miller a stupid clown, and says he should not be elected. It’s really quite a read…
http://alaskadispatch.com/voices/tundra-talk/7254-ben-stein-good-old-tail-gunner-joe-miller
The Republican core team is realizing that they are losing control of the Tea Party, & has begun to turn against them.
In defense of my one-time hero, Ben Stein has never really been a right wing ideologue. He has criticized republicans plenty of times in his American Spectator essays, opining that Dubya just wasn’t up to the job, for instance. He’s also called for raising the taxes on the rich to help pay for military benefits and said in interviews that a government has a duty to provide for its people, which, I suspect, is one of the reasons that he never became the Teabaggers’ little darling. His popularity level on Free Republic hovers between lukewarm tolerance and absolute loathing. I don’t really agree with him on much anymore, but as a moderate conservative, I respect the hell out of his willingness to take his own side on as well as that of his opponents.
He seems to have lost the cheese on his cracker over the past few years, and he’s gotten a bit ranty–Expelled is one of several reasons he’s my one-time hero–but this column isn’t out of character for him at all.
One aspect of the Tea Partiers that must make Ben Stein feel uncomfortable is their anti-intellectualism.
Noted in the Alaska election thread.
Neither is he entirely an old-guard rational, intellectual conservative; he wrote an article or two in defense of creationism being taught in schools not too long ago. Ben Stein is pretty erratic; I’m glad to see him on the side of rationality for once.
I wonder if he learned anything from the Expelled debacle? He must have read all of the scathing rebuttals and factual refutations. I never disliked him until he did that movie. I really liked his game show. Maybe he’s back from La La Land.
That was my opinion of him as well. Sure he was conservative, but he had a sense of humor about his ways and I could actually listen to him. He wasn’t the Republican party of old where the candidates could speak 4 languages but he was close.
Then Expelled…I felt dirty for ever liking him. Utterly loathsome.
Yeah, but that’s probably because he’s a Jew.
Heh-heh-heh . . . Too late, guys! You should have remembered the first rule of safe demonology: “Do not call up any you cannot again put down.”
That, and that smarmy smirk he puts on when he thinks he has made an incontrovertible point, like he just had a particularly satisfying bowel movement.