Letters to the Editor
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You can be academically brilliant
...and still be stupid. Because stupidity doesn't depend on your I.Q. or your level of education, it depends on your ideas. If your ideas are stupid, then you, too, are stupid.
We've all seen the guy on the freeway tailgating a few inches behind a semi-truck. Well, the guy has at least enough I.Q. to put the car on freeway. More likely than not, he's got enough I.Q. to buy the car himself, and he might even be a brilliant and accomplished person. Yet he's still engaging in stupid behavior. He thinks it's OK to drive inches behind a semi-truck on the freeway. That's stupid. If he thinks he can't die, that's also stupid. It's stupid because the idea is stupid. It has nothing to do with his I.Q.
That's what the Bush administration is doing in Iraq and the ME. They are basically tailgating inches behind a giant ass semi-truck, and if something should happen to dart in front of the truck while we're blindly driving behind it, we could find ourselves instantly crushed into two inches of nothing. That's how wrong the invasion of Iraq is. The Bushies are stupid because their ideas are stupid.
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Anonymous
You finally got one right; you don't know what is. Half of eligible Americans don't register to vote. Half of those that do don't vote, and that's in a presidential election. Many local elections are decided by ten or fifteen percent of the potential electorate. That's why fascists win. Murkans spout patriotic slogans, have yellow ribbons on their SUVS, and then dishonor the country by sitting on their increasingly fat asses on election day. Far more than burning the flag, that cuts at the heart of what America is supposed to be. IF that's bigoted, so be it. It's also a stone cold fact. And a damned shame. And we're exporting "liberty" to the rest of the world? We might try it ourselves for a while first. You just keep being a good german and an anonymous sheep. Not me. I have never missed an election of any kind at any level in the 42 years since I became eligible to vote- even when uncle sam sent me all over the Pacific to defend "liberty". Go fire up a hummer; either definition will suffice. Happy surge: we just passed 3300 dead (not counting "contractors", which just means out-sourced privatized armies. They're just as American and just as dead. They just get paid better.
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For Bill
Hi Bill,
I'm late in arriving to this piece, but I'm posting on the chance that you see this. I wanted to say I agree with you wholeheartedly, and I've seen it for years in many fields, not just politics. You don't have kids, but if you did, you'd be appalled at what passes for smart teachers. (Whenever my kid gets a horrible one, I always hear from friends, "Little Johnny needs to be able to deal with all kinds of bosses later in life, even ones who don't know thus and so," as if any other profession tolerates incompetent workers and tells customers "We know the teller/cashier/accountant by the far wall is horrible, but it's good for you!") But that one's going to get me in trouble, so on to what I sent to the Plain Dealer right after the election of 2004:
"I wish the post-election attacks on Democrats would stop already. For crying out loud! If a mere 136,000 votes had swung the other way in Ohio, everyone would be wringing their hands and wondering why the President couldn't connect with the Northeast instead of wondering why Kerry didn't connect with the Heartland. I'm stunned at the liberal bashing that's been leveled by Republicans since their victory, mainly the bitter recriminations about an intellectual elitism. I'll gladly own up to mine, but frankly it feels rational. Conservatives have to admit it doesn't help their image when they nominate a candidate as inarticulate as W, whose convoluted English isn't nearly as worrisome as his simplistic world view, his patriotic jingoism, and his apparent inferiority to his own VP in policy matters. It also doesn't help their case when a large, independent study comes out less than two weeks before the election with the astounding finding that a full three-fourths of Bush supporters got the answers wrong on a patently objective (and widely covered) test on American foreign policy, including whether and when Iraq had WMD and whether Saddam had a "substantial/direct" link to 9/11. And what intelligent person doesn't pause when the normally reserved scientific community, including 48 Nobel laureates, rises up against a sitting president for his regressive policy on everything from the environment to weapons systems to medical research? Forgive me my contempt for the electorate who brought this anti-intellectual back into office. As a final note, the shoe is on the other foot when it comes to superiority of the moral variety; there is simply no one more self-righteous than an Evangelical who sees the path to Heaven straight through George Bush."
What cracks me up is that anyone who defended elitism back in 2004 was doing so BEFORE Katrina! LOL. Like anything spelled incompetence more than that disaster.
see ya. keep up the good work.
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Some of them are smarter than you think.
I can't vouch for the quality of Regent University Law School (though the U.S. News rankings would seem to take care of that question), but I can state with some certainty that, even in lowly colleges founded by televangelists, the Christian Right is effectively arming itself for the battle to control the direction of America's future.
Jerry Falwell's Liberty University made national headlines last year with their debate team, which managed to earn the #1 national ranking in collegiate debating in both 2005 and 2006. The ranking generated some controversy due to the fact that it was largely the consequence of clever strategy--sending the team to oodles of small tournaments where they could accumulate rankings points without facing the toughest competition; stacking the J.V. debating team with ringers (J.V. tournament points factor into the overall rankings), etc.--but this sort of chicanery is a form of political savvy, and functions according to the same principles of the conservative talk radio and TV shows: take a forceful, charismatic conservative voice (I know it's hard for most of us to see O'Reilly or Limbaugh as charismatic, but clearly, someone does) put it up against mediocre, bumbling opposition, watch the conservative's superior forcefulness and confidence juxtaposed with the respondent's clumsiness and rhetorical ineptitude, and feel the country shift ever so slightly to the right.
Liberty University is also a 4th tier school in U.S. News' undergraduate college rankings. Even factoring in the 'juking' of the statistics, we should all be alarmed that a tiny little college founded by a hate-mongering enemy of free speech less than thirty-five years ago can even be competitive against the traditional elite universities (factoring out the trickery, Liberty's debate team ranks about 20th--still far, far ahead of many 1st and 2nd tier colleges and universities with competitive debate teams).
It's not that these Regent and Liberty graduates are dumb, Bill--it's that they don't give a shit about anything but serving their masters' agendas. They have been prepped practically from birth to see their lives as a Christian mission to win back Washington from the godless elites. The attorney scandal is an example of their philosophy: they didn't screw up; they broke the law, believing that the 'ends justify the means'--the end, in this case, being control of the federal court system for the Republican Party. They are not incompetent--they are dishonest.
Be afraid--be very afraid.