Media liberals should never protest when they are accused of being snobs, since they assume that anyone who votes Republican has demonstrated a genetic defect, or a phobia against book learnin’. Washington Post humorist Gene Weingarten started up a chat at his discussion group (“The Gene Pool,” how appropriate) about whether stupid Republicans inadvertently gave America the conditions for the historic gift of Obama:

Today’s question comes from my editor, Tom The Butcher, and it is a little disturbing. Tom proposes that we wind back the clock to 2004, elevate the IQ of a few hundred thousand voters from the great state of Ohio, and reverse the results of the presidential election. Maybe even further back to 2000 and do the same for Florida. So you have been spared the last eight years, but at a price:
The conditions will have never coalesced for Obama’s rise; his improbable national success came because he was an outsider challenging an incompetent and malign culture of government. Today, he’s a U.S. Senator, a middle-of-the-pack Democrat, maybe never of a stature to challenge his party’s hierarchy. Were the last four or eight years worth it?

The answers from liberals are amusing (as is the conservative pretender with the joke headline “Our Redeemer.” ) Most would rather remove Bush from history. Take this one:

I would rather not have lived in a time of torture, spying on US citizens by their own government, and radical politicization of the Justice Department. Mr O, despite the spittle-flecked analysis of the National Journal, is not terribly liberal. He’s a moderate. He seems liberal compared to the current administration, but then, so would Kublai Khan. So, no, it isn’t worth it. Fire up the wayback machine.

And of course, you get the natural liberal jerk of the knee: “I think a case could be made that 9/11 would not have happened on Gore’s watch.”