Ailes: “I must say that you have held up very well so many years after playing Alice on The Brady Bunch.. So tell me, just between you and me: Could you tell right away Mr. Brady was gay?”

Where you went to school is not as important as what you got out of it. I know people who went to Ivy League schools and can’t put a coherent sentence together, and I know people who never finished college and are absolutely brilliant.

The real issue is not so much intellectual prowess as it is intellectual honesty and intellectual curiosity. When the people LNSmithee lists are put to this test, the answers become clearer. Which of these people are willing to pursue the facts, even if in the end they produce a different result than their original premise? That is intellectual curiosity. Which of these people are then willing to go on the air and say – “Here is what I originally thought, here is what I learned, here is how my thinking has changed”?

By that measurement, Rachel Maddow stands miles above everyone listed, left and right. She is both curious enough to research and honest enough to learn and change.

Olbermann is intellectually honest, but not very curious. That is to say, his arguments are usually sound, but there is often more to be heard on the subject that he does not pursue because it might eat into his self-righteous indignation.

Al Gore is first and foremost a politician and thus while extremely intellectually curious he has often fallen short when it comes to intellectual honesty. However, in my opinion he has been both on the subject of global warming.

Kerry, perhaps because he is still in politics, is clearly intellectually curious as shown in his (incredibly long winded) questioning in committee meetings, but he is very far from intellectually honest as he clearly is searching for specific arguments to support an already chosen position.

Jindal is intellectually honest – he states the conclusions that he has drawn from the information he has gathered, but he is stunningly uncurious. He would have recognized his own comments about a volcano warning system as ridiculous if he had been curious enough to find out what it was he was choosing as an example of government waste.

That just leaves O’Reilly and Bush. These men are both extreme but for two different reasons.

O’Reilly is, simply put, the most intellectually dishonest voice on television. He is clearly very, very smart – yet he states things that he knows to be untrue, and uses rhetoric he is smart enough to know is potentially dangerous, on a constant basis. He will claim to have never said things that he is on tape saying, all because he knows his key demographic will always take him at his word and don’t watch the stations that will go to the videotape to keep them all honest – left and right (god bless John Stewart).

Bush, on the other hand, is the most intellectually incurious person I could imagine. This is a man who decided to go to war in Iraq before he even knew what Shia and Sunni were. This is a man who at times of national crises delegated everything out and just trusted it was handled, doing little or no follow up on his own (remember “Heck of a job Brownie”) to see if things were going as well as those around him said they were. While Obama surrounds himself with more qualified people, I am starting to become concerned that the latter tendency is one he shares.