http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/7958Hail to the Stupid
by Brian Morton | Jun 7 2007
snip//
But it all comes back to what we've subliminally been told we should want in our country's leaders for a few decades now. We are told that we want someone we should feel comfortable sitting down and having a beer with, someone who "is a regular guy." The jokers at Fox had a great time mocking John Kerry for his windsurfing after hailing George W. Bush prancing around the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in a flight suit after helping pilot his jet out to the boat. War-decorated Kerry, who rides motorcycles and pilots helicopters and (lest we forget) Swift boats, was treated as some sort of dork, while Bush, who got his ass handed to him in each of their three debates, gets a pass for not being able to string simple sentences together with a subject, verb, and object.
Apparently we should lionize the stupid.
snip//
Our nation faces skyrocketing debt, an oncoming health-care crisis, the rapidly advancing retirement of the baby boom and its attendant sociological challenges, the problems due to the lack of a coherent energy policy, and the extrication of hundreds of thousands of troops from Iraq, along with the threat of terrorism. Do we really want a president with the qualities you'd find in the guy at the end stool at Moe's bar to run the country?
Republicans, with their simple bromides about terrorism, constantly mock Democrats and liberals (contrary to what you might hear from Sean Hannity, they're not the same thing) for "not understanding terrorism." The leading GOP presidential candidates approach terrorism as if they were screenwriters for 24, to the point where one candidate's chest-thumping pledge to "double Guantanamo" has to be topped with "I'd hire Jack Bauer."
The problems we face require smarts, open-mindedness, and an appreciation of (and respect for) that thing the Bush administration scoffs at: nuance. But if history is to be our guide, let's recall that Everyman isn't big on eggheads running the show. Adlai Stevenson got dusted twice by Dwight Eisenhower back in the Soviet-fraught 1950s, despite a consensus that he far outpaced the also-smart but more staid military general in the thinking department.
After sarcastically deriding him as "professor" and sniffing that he "practically oozes gray matter," Milbank concludes his assault on Gore by quoting one of the audience members at Gore's speech at George Washington University, a Germantown resident named Alan Schwartz, who asks, "how do you convince people it's OK to feel inferior to their leaders?"
I would answer that by pointing out that the last six years are what happens when your leaders are mentally inferior to you.
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