Hell month is well underway, and if FBC were a child, I’d be hauled away for neglect… if I were a priest, there’d be ruined lives and lawsuits… you get the point.
Anyways, in continuing with the theme that never goes away, that being “the GOP’s perpetual dumbing down of America”, I gotta point you to the latest Krugman… it’s a real gem:
Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.
What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”
It’s one of those things that has one pulling one’s own hair out and running over random pedestrians in the street — it’s really that frustrating. It’s taking advantage of the low-information voter, or rather the low-information citizen, because even if they don’t vote, they still tend to have those stupid opinions that they bombard you with at the family barbecue (jeez, ya’ think I’m just a little worried about the upcoming wedding? My family is full of ‘em.)
It’s really the fruit of the conservative political strategy of the last few decades… foster mistrust in anyone who uses big words, is obviously educated (I say “obviously” as a lot of these GOP’ers went to Ivy League and such, but do their best to hide it and come across as a dumb hick), likes food that isn’t bland, fried in lard, or may have a funny name… you get the point. For your ponderance, I leave you with another quote fromthe article, by GOP hack-extraordinaire, Peggy Noonan:
Let’s also not forget that for years President Bush was the center of a cult of personality that lionized him as a real-world Forrest Gump, a simple man who prevails through his gut instincts and moral superiority. “Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man,” declared Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2004. “He’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world.”
The scary thing is that I wonder if there is indeed some truth to Bush being like the “average American man”. Sigh.
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