The conservatives that I know continue to believe they are smarter than the rest of us. We see fossil fuels as the cause of Global Warming, they declare the jury is "still out" (at best). We see tax cuts for the rich as placing a burden on lower income workers, they declare these tax cuts will benefit the poor by, uh, giving rich people more money. We saw the Iraq War as a mission to stop a madman with WMDs, they now declare that it was all about setting up democracy in the Middle East. They get it, we don't.

The problem is that the facts just don't line up. Global Warming is a huge problem that is caused, primarily, by human activity. The 2000 scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came to this conclusion in 1995 and then again in 2000. Unconvinced, President Bush (provoked by conservative "intellectuals") asked the National Academy of Sciences to review the IPCC findings. The result? "The [NAS] committee generally agrees with the assessment of human-caused climate change presented in the IPCC ... report." Did that satisfy the conservatives? Hardly. Instead, Bush orchestrated the ouster of the IPCC Chair, Robert Watson and replaced this eminent atmospheric scientist with an Indian economist, Rejandra Pachauri.

In other words, if the facts don't fit, just change them!

Intellectual? I guess they can just change the definition. So yes, if you consider slavish allegiance to antiquated notions of Truth to be intellectualism, then conservatives are indeed intellectuals.