The Village is still pretending it spends its evenings knocking back a few dozen Coors with Joe the Plumber

How else to explain why the Washington Post sees having a bunch of intelligent, thoughtful people in Barack Obama's cabinet as a liability:

All told, of Obama's top 35 appointments so far, 22 have degrees from an Ivy League school, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago or one of the top British universities. For the other slots, the president-elect made do with graduates of Georgetown and the Universities of Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina.

While Obama's picks have been lauded for their ethnic and ideological mix, they lack diversity in one regard: They are almost exclusively products of the nation's elite institutions and generally share a more intellectual outlook than is often the norm in government. Their erudition has already begun to set a new tone in the capital, cheering Obama's supporters and serving as a clarion call to other academics. Yale law professor Dan Kahan said several of his colleagues are for the first time considering leaving their perches for Washington.

[snip]

But skeptics say Obama's predilection for big thinkers with dazzling résumés carries risks, noting, for one, that several of President John F. Kennedy's "best and brightest" led the country into the Vietnam War. Obama is to be credited, skeptics say, for bringing with him so few political acquaintances from Illinois. But, they say, his team reflects its own brand of insularity, drawing on the world that Obama entered as an undergraduate at Columbia and in which he later rose to eminence as president of the Harvard Law Review and as a law professor at the University of Chicago.

I wonder who these "skeptics" are? William Kristol? Rush Limbaugh? Tom Brokaw? All the other media hacks who have never once in the last eight years been right about anything at all, even as they lauded the blue-collar mythos of Captain Codpiece (who is now abandoning his sham show "ranch" for the comfortable Dallas suburbs -- a development anyone with a brain could have predicted)?

As Dharma notes:

I think that after eight years of dumb, I am ready to see what a group of really smart people can accomplish!

The fact that Bush pulled many of his appointees out of Texas, and those who were close family or personal friends, has never gone unnoticed. Look what it did for the country! The fact that he barely made it through college, and some of his appointees did not even attend, makes it apparent that we now could use some intellect in the White House.

Funny how the "insularity" of George W. Bush's little Texas mafia didn't meet with the same degree of scorn.