Government by the S

Beginning in 2001, George W. Bush introduced me to a new concept that I hadn't knowingly met before -- government by the S, as in DUMB ASS. I started finding out about GWB by watching a TV presidential debate, and on first impression, I couldn't believe that the Republican party would nominate a candidate so stupid, regardless of his status as a presidential son. As the Bush/Cheney years progressed, and I got to know the VP a bit better, I quickly concluded that he had a few more working brain cells than his partner, but I have lately realized that I gave him much more credit than he deserved.

During the Bush/Cheney era, progressives often remarked on how the B/C crowd made Orwellian use of the English language, and consistently implied, but never directly stated, that Iraq had some connection with 9/11. When questioned directly, they denied making any such connection, yet they continued to imply it in their public statements. I assumed that they knew they were lying, just as I assumed Donald Rumsfeld knew he was lying when he claimed in a televised national press conference to know the location of Iraq's phantom WMDs.

Lately, however, in the face of mounting evidence, I've concluded that Rumsfeld actually believed in those WMDs, and I also now think that most of the Bush/Cheney crowd believed in the phantom 9/11 connection. They knew that troublesome reporters from the liberal media (or the nuanced media, as I explain in my 3/10/14 blog) would dog them about something they couldn't actually prove, so they never directly asserted it, but I think they did believe it.

How could someone as smart as Dick Cheney believe something so absurd? Easy -- he's actually not that smart. Mr. Cheney has a manner of conveying his thoughts and opinions in a way that makes him sound informed and intelligent, but if you actually pay attention to what he's saying rather than the way he's saying it, and you know the facts that contradict his assertions, you will know that he's actually talking nonsense most, if not all, of the time. For example, as I pointed out in my Hobgoblins blog (3/22/14), his 1% solution to foreign policy threats was, in reality, an admission of his own inability to distinguish between a 1% threat and a 100% one.

At the root, the hobgoblins that haunt the right-wing mind lurk there for one simple reason -- these people are stupid. There are levels of stupid, of course -- someone who talks about members of the Muslim Brotherhood hiding in the executive branch of the U.S. government is obviously a few rungs further down the ladder than someone who claims to have lists of secret communists there -- but none of these accusations ever made any sense. And did McCarthy have no sense of decency? Actually, he had no sense at all. Do Bush, Cheney and most of their crowd feel any sense of remorse for the way they destroyed the lives of thousands upon thousands of people? No, because they also have no sense. When you elect people this stupid, you get stuff like 9/11 and Iraq, and stupid people believing that the 2 are connected, when the only thing that really connects them is the stupid people who couldn't prevent the first and who caused the second. While government will always include some representatives from the ranks of the stupid, I hope we're moving in the direction of having more smarter people involved in governance, though from, say, the look of the current majority on the Supreme Court, we sure do have a lot of room for improvement.