I have been saying this for years.

When I look at what the next president will have to deal with, I don't see much that can be solved with just a winning smile, a firm handshake and a ton of resolve. I see conundrums, dilemmas, quandaries, impasses, gnarly thickets of fateful possibility with no obvious way out. Iraq is the obvious place he or she will have to start; I want a president smart enough to figure out how to minimize the damage.


I want a president who reads newspapers, who reads books other than those that confirm his worldview, who bones up on Persian history before deciding how to deal with Iran's ambitious dreams of glory. I want a president who understands the relationship between energy policy at home and U.S. interests in the Middle East -- and who's smart enough to form his or her own opinions, not just rely on what old friends in the oil business say.

I want a president who looks forward to policy meetings on health care and has ideas to throw into the mix.


I want a president who believes in empirical fact, whose understanding of spirituality is complete enough to know that faith is "the evidence of things not seen" and who knows that for things that can be seen, the relevant evidence is fact, not belief. I want a president -- and it's amazing that I even have to put this on my wish list -- smart enough to know that Darwin was right.

You know, not to blow my own horn, but most people consider me to be pretty intelligent. I am a quick learner and able to master subjects fairly quickly. However I do not consider myself to be smart enough to be the President!

Yeah I know that there are very few people who know everything that they will need to run this country before they are elected. But I would like to hope that they are much further along the learning curve then I am right now.

I think that in that arena Bill Clinton was much better equipped then I am to be President, so is Al Gore, actually so is Hillary. I think that Barack Obama is very intelligent, and John Edwards, and even Dennis Kucinich, are all very smart people who could probably handle being the President.

But then we have the Republicans.

The first ones you have to take off of the smart list are Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, and Tom Tancredo, who are so undereducated that they don't even believe in evolution!

Then you have John McCain who is such a simpleton that he cannot even tell that we have lost the Iraq war, even though he has actually been there!

Or Duncan Hunter who, during the whole Abu Ghraib scandal, insisted that they must be well treated because they had such great food. He even showed a plate of the delicious food for the cameras so that we could all wish that we were there eating Chicken Alfredo, while stacked in a human pyramid naked.

Or Mitt Romney who thinks that the solution to our credibility problems is to double the size of Guantanamo. Somebody has not been reading the newspapers.

And then we have Rudy Giuliani who thinks that since the planes that destroyed the towers did not kill him he must be seen as some sort of messiah, who we should all admire even though he ignored the warnings of an impending attack and then exposed his rescue workers to lung damaging dust in his rush to appear in charge.

Which really just leaves Ron Paul, the only Republican, or Democrat for that matter, who accurately explained that the people who attacked us on 9-11 did so, not because they hated our freedom, but because they hated us for meddling in their governments and bombing their countries.

So if you want to elect an intelligent President then you need to vote Democrat. Or you could always choose Ron Paul as a write in candidate.