Pat Robertson: What is mac and cheese, a black thing?

From the Houston Chronicle:

"A confused Robertson, who grew up in Lexington, Va., acted like he had never heard of the culinary dish, a popular American staple for generations and absent-mindedly singled out the meal as a food reserved for blacks. Smithsonian Magazine notes that Kraft Foods first introduced its boxed macaroni and cheese in 1937.

'It is a black thing, Pat!' exclaimed Watts. 'Listen! And you guys! The world needs to get on board with macaroni and cheese. Seriously, I just– Christmas and Thanksgiving, we have to have macaroni and cheese and it just trips me out that you just don’t.'"

Video here.

It's tempting to just shrug this off as Robertson slipping into senile dementia, or stupid Southern racialist thinking, something that's just about the fundamentalist preacher and one time GOP presidential contender as an individual. This bizarre gaffe, however, fits into a much wider pattern of total conservative cluelessness about not only racial issues, but all kinds of stuff. I mean, we've got Rick Perry's racist-named hunting lodge out in West Texas. We've got Herman Cain's "Uz-becki-becki-beckistan." We've got Newt Gingrich wanting to turn poor children into sub-minimum wage janitors. Sarah Palin thinking that Alaska's proximity to the Bering Strait makes her an expert on diplomacy. And, of course, there's the global warming denial. And creationism.

I mean, it really looks like conservatives are just as droolingly stupid as people can get. But these people are also capable of mounting very successful propaganda campaigns and winning elective office. They're also pretty good at business. No, they're not stupid. So what gives?

Frankly, I don't know. I mean, obviously, it's some kind of self-imposed ignorance on some subjects but not others, and it's clear that a lot of this bullshit has something to do with how certain facts render key conservative beliefs inoperative--for instance, the financial implosion of 2007 proves beyond a doubt that markets are not self-regulating; acceptance of man made global warming means embracing governmental regulation of business. But not all right-wing cluelessness is about protecting foundational assumptions about the way the world works. I mean, a lot of it appears to be just straight-up ignorance.

At any rate, it seems that conservatives see ignorance as some sort of strength. Maybe it has to do with this nation's traditional anti-intellectualism--book smarts aren't too helpful out on the frontier when you need to kill Indians and harvest the crop. I don't know. It's all very maddening.

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