The Lightweight: Meghan McCain

Just as you thought American pop-politics could go no lower, a woman with real curb appeal appears on the political scene. Meghan McCain might just be the greatest ditz to date to emerge from that big tent Republicans keep touting.

Meghan made her first major debut on the Rachel Maddow Show. There, in defiance of Ms. McCain's empty refrains and non sequiturs, the left-liberal TV talker helped establish her as a person in possession of a functioning frontal lobe.

"I love being open," Meghan babbled. [I bet] "I'm so different; I've seen a lot," uttered in that staccato, tart inflection. "I'm a twit," or was it "I twitter"? Who knows? More vintage verbiage from La McCain: "It's like weird. I don't completely understand econ; I keep reading, I just don't understand it … I only write what I know about." [Translation: I write a lot about very little.]

If Republicans don't end their love affair with idiots, it's not a bigger tent they'll be seeking, but a giant tin-foil hat.

Meghan is like a dripping tap. If you've read the first few lines of a blog post, you've read all two diarrheic pages of it. Ms. McCain's favorite, young Republican candidate is some "hottie" who believes in "the capital system," appeals to minorities, and is wise to the use of the paparazzi (an absolute must).

Buzzwords peppered with clichés, and prefaced with "I feel like," convey Meghan's mushy, thinking-averse, pop-politics: "I feel like we need to be reaching out to moderates and young people. I feel like we need to be reaching out to minorities."

The creature gets away with calling herself a writer because America has facilitated her delusions of grandeur. Meghan has written for Newsweek, no less, and now pens a blog for the Daily Beast .  Both publications accept Ms. McCain's version of a premise and a conclusion. For example: "I, like, disagree with that completely, and think that's, like, completely crazy."

The Huffington Post was particularly empathic, crediting Meghan with "arguing," or making a case for a more moderate GOP. "The GOP, a party which she 'loves,' needs to become more moderate and reach out more, especially to younger voters." Or, in megalo-Meghan speak: "I'm the only one who's saying these things."

As hopeless, Republicans have failed to make the only valid case against Meghan, and that is that she is really, really stupid. (Laura Ingraham practically apologized for lampooning the girl's unmistakable moronity.) It is no accident that the woman studs her conversation with mind-numbing commonplaces and humbugs.

Ann Coulter could have easily dispatched of the ding-dong, as she did Keith Olbermann . A couple of masterful syllogisms mixed in with a few devastating facts, and that would be it. Alas, by denying Ms. McCain the satisfaction, Annie Orkin has left us with a pest-control problem.

Did I mention that the cerebrally challenged Ms. McCain hopes to unseat Ms. Coulter as the new, improved conservative Queen Bee? She writes: "I hope viewers understand Ann Coulter is not the woman we Republicans need representing us right now." The implication being, dot, dot, dot.

THE AGE OF THE IDIOT

Ms. McCain also accused Ann Coulter of anti-Semitism, a silliness I dispelled in a column about the Coulter-Donny Deutsch dust-up. A measure of the absence of any realistic self-appraisal is Ms. McCain's failure to grasp that her prominence as a "writer," rather than as a Paris Hilton-style reality show performer, is owed first to her famous father, and second, to the fact that this is the Age of the Idiot.

Idiots have come into their own in a big way, courtesy of depraved consumers, and complicit TV producers and publishers, of pixel and paper alike. The duller you are and the louder you crow in contemporary America, the better you do. Clearly, Meghan McCain is not working with much—and is eminently qualified to dim debate in the Age of the Idiot. A familial predisposition, it would seem. John McCain finished 894th out of 899 at the Naval Academy and lost five jets. As IQ ace Steve Sailer once quipped, "To lose one plane over Vietnam may be regarded as a heroic tragedy; to lose five planes here and there looks like carelessness."

Mrs. McCain, however, is a rather refined, well-spoken, and certainly  strikingly beautiful lady, in that icy, Nordic way. At the very least, mother McCain might have taught Miss Mindless to avoid speaking in those grating tones.

The housing house-of-cards was not the only "bubble in search of a pin" in the modern-day U.S.A. The intellectual bubble is also begging to be burst.

As for Republicans, if they don't stop their love affair with idiots, it's not a bigger tent they'll be seeking, but a giant tin-foil hat.

ILANA MERCER is a widely published classical liberal writer and the author of Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With a Corrupt Society . Ilana is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies . She is also a columnist for WorldNetDaily.com. Her forthcoming book is Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa. “The titular tease,” writes ilana in the Introduction, “is meant as a metaphor, and is inspired by Ayn Rand ’s wise counsel against prostrating civilization to savagery.” Ilana’s website is www.ilanamercer.com ; she blogs reluctantly but regularly at www.barelyablog.com .

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