From Webster’s: Intelligentsia : intellectuals who form an artistic, social, or political vanguard or elite

Sarah Palin is roundly hated by the Left, the media elites, Republican Blue-Bloods, and the political intelligentsia who think the country should be run by people who “know what’s best” for the common man. Those who should run the country, in their eyes, are Harvard and Yale educated wunderkinds, like Geithner, Paulson, the investment house of Goldman Sachs, and all the wonderful people who gave us derivatives, cap and trade, Enron, bailouts, the housing crisis, and stimulus packages. These programs all came from people who claim to know what is best for us. They allowed banks to charge usurious interest rates of 35% on credit cards, enslaving the poorest of the poor to perpetual debt. Favoring the banking industry, they legalized loan-sharking. These intellectual elites have no problem enslaving the working class in order to provide profits for major corporations and international businesses. If you look at Geithner’s resume, you start to wonder if he works for the US government, or for some global agency whose main concern is international commerce – not loyalty to the country or patriotism:

In 2002 he left the Treasury to join the Council on Foreign Relations as a Senior Fellow in the International Economics department.[16] He was director of the Policy Development and Review Department (2001–2003) at the International Monetary Fund.[7]
In October 2003 at age 42,[17] he was named president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.[18] His salary in 2007 was $398,200.[19] As President of the New York Fed, he served as Vice Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee. In 2006, he also became a member of the Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty.[20] In May 2007 he worked to reduce the capital required to run a bank. (emphasis added! – just before the banking collapse of 2008!)[17]

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Geithner

“Capital must protect itself in every possible way, both by combination and legislation. Debts must be collected, mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When, through the process of law the common people lose their homes, they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of government applied by a central power of wealth under leading financiers. These truths are well known among our principal men who are now engaged in forming an imperialism to govern the world. By dividing the voter through the political party system we can get them to expend their energies in fighting for questions of no importance. It is thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves that which has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished.” – Montagu Norman, Governor of The Bank Of England, addressing the United States Bankers’ Association, NYC 1924

The ruling, economic elite gained power even while backing politicians who got elected by promising the working class more and more benefits, to be paid for by the “rich.” They were not worried about these unfunded political promises as long as they could make money through favorable business regulations. It is odd to see that the most left-wing political politician in decades, Barak Obama, in bed with the economic ruling class in the likes of Goldman Sachs and Wall Street. But Harvard is as Harvard does. The problem is that the idealism of the elite is coming unraveled at its economic seams. By promising social benefits but lying about their true cost, this ruling class has put the nation into unsustainable debt, largely to China, through unrestrained deficit spending. In effect, they told us: “There is a free lunch, you can have it all, and you can get something for nothing!”

The problem perhaps started in 1969 when the Democratically controlled Congress began counting Social Security revenues in the budget along with general tax revenues, thus obscuring the fact that the government was borrowing money from the trust fund to fund general expenditures. In other words, the budget was not only not balanced, it was way more unbalanced than Congress let on. The government was spending much more money than it was taking in. Deficit spending happened in the Depression and in WWII as well, but with the change in 1969, the problem became institutionalized as an accepted accounting practice. In large part, that is how General Motors went bankrupt. They failed to fund their pension obligations, and in the end the debt was so large they could never repay it, so they were bailed out by the taxpayers. Now, because the Social Security pension and Medicare plans are underfunded (just as state, local and many corporate pension plans are severely underfunded), we are heading towards not only insolvency in our retirement system, but bankruptcy for the entire US Government as our pension liabilities become greater than our revenues from the US taxpayer. In other words, in order to pay for this unfunded pension plan, we will have to stop spending on defense, education, welfare, and a host of other programs. And soon, just to pay the interest on our debt, it will take all the tax revenues for the foreseeable future. Yet the politicians promised us even more benefits by expanding government services with things like government health care. We want all our needs met by government but cannot accept the fact that we cannot pay for everything we want. We are broke!

The Appeal of Sarah

People who can see what’s coming don’t have to be rocket scientists. They just have to have enough common sense to know that “You don’t spend more money than you take in.” If you run your personal finances responsibly, most rational people think you ought to run the government the same way. If spending more than you earn leads to bankruptcy for an individual, then you just know it is going to cause bankruptcy in a nation as well. It is this common sense approach that appears to be sorely lacking in all those who claim to know what is best for us and have all these schemes to fix it. The elites don’t understand then why Sarah Palin is so popular with the common man. It is because she speaks for everyone who trusts more in common sense than in intellectual rationalizations. If saying “don’t spend more money than you earn” is offensive to the educated class, then the common sense person sees the “educated” class as clueless.

You would think then that those who rely on common sense would want to see taxes raised to cover the deficits. But they have a valid reason for taking a different view. Paying taxes is like giving money to a drunk on the street. You know that giving him money isn’t going to reform him or cause him to stop drinking. By giving him money, you are just enabling him to go out and buy more booze, which is what he wants to do anyway. The Federal Government is an alcoholic that keeps denying it has a drinking problem. It thinks that the fix for its problems is more revenue, so it can spend its way out of its hole. The common sense answer to that is to put that drunken sailor into detox and leave him there till he is clean. Let him squirm and scream and start having delirium tremens, but you have to take drastic action to dry him out. In other words, the common sense approach is to tell the government to stop spending. We don’t care what you’ve promised, but if you don’t have the money to pay for all those programs, then cut it out! The only way to balance this budget is to strangle the government and deprive it of its revenues. Otherwise, it will never learn its lesson.

If Sarah has any appeal to the common man, it is because she appeals to that common sense wisdom of the average citizen who has to work for a living. The Intellectual Elites don’t get that, but that just proves to the rest of us that they are part of the problem, rather than the solution.