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One of the best-ever episodes of "The Simpsons" came in 1999, when Lisa and other members of the Springfield Mensa club took over the town -- and, predictably, made a disaster of it. Luckily, in the end, physicist Stephen Hawking swooped down in his helicopter-powered wheelchair to deliver a lecture about humility.

This prompted one of the best Homer Simpson lines of all time: "Larry Flynt is right!"

On a related note, you may have heard that Barack Obama adviser Samantha Power (left) resigned from the campaign today after calling Hillary Clinton a "monster" in an interview. Power, a Harvard professor, has written powerfully about genocide, so she presumably knows who the real monsters are -- nonetheless, she made an unwise comment, and sacrificed herself to limit the controversy to one news cycle.

(We will leave, for the moment, the question of why the Clinton campaign is making such a fuss about a thoughtless comment when it is quite deliberately making ads that darken Obama's skin. We will, however, offer up a thought experiment: What do you think the initial reaction in the Clinton camp was when they heard about the "monster" comment? Anger or glee?)

This, of course, comes a few days after another Obama adviser, economist Austin Goolsbee, apparently told the Canadians that Obama was just joshing with all that anti-NAFTA talk -- and maybe handed the Ohio primary to Clinton as a result.

Power and Goolsbee are, by all accounts, very smart people. But it's clear that they're not politicians.

Let's clarify: They might be very smart about politics. But clearly they aren't very good at politics.

This isn't a bash-them-eggheads post. It's good to have smart people working for a campaign. But unless you know they're good at politics, it's probably best to keep them quiet and behind the scenes.

Samantha Power photo from AP.