Monday, March 23, 2015

Ted Cruz, the Latest American Presidential Embarrassment

Yesterday I spoke with my conservative but otherwise sensible friend to ask, man, don't these yahoos embarrass you.  I offered that Hillary Clinton embarrasses me and that wasn't simply a throwaway to elicit a response.

Ben Carson is the only conservative candidate he considered worthy of support but he observed there's evidence of damage in that one as well due to ardent belief in Intelligent Design.

Note:  we asked a mouthful of dentists if they believe there is Intelligent Design and they replied unanimously, "Let's review.  You get two sets of teeth.  The first set doesn't even work and falls out.  The second set falls apart so much that it gives me a career for life.  What's your guess about my thoughts on Intelligent Design?"

Part of the basis for my friend's support for Carson is based on a good education but he was puzzled how a belief in Intelligent Design survived that.  In short, he's the only credible candidate for my friend and he's not his dream date.


This is the Era of the Devious Democrats as they don't espouse any part of the traditional platform so they achieve success by ruse.  Obama has been pretending to be a Democrat for years and Clinton looks like she will play it the same way.  That means only one thing:  not one damn thing will change.  That would only be marginally different from Obama who said he would do things ... and then didn't.


Elizabeth McGovern was become a ghost as she was highly-visible for a while but has faded back.  Either she ran out of money or Clinton bought her off.  Bernie Sanders is the only other credible Democrat (i.e. one who really does know and support the platform) but he has no chance of winning.


The ones listed here aren't particularly embarrassing, they're just no damn good or they have no chance.  However, when Ted Cruz enters the contest, it becomes a satire.  He's typical of a class of low brain-weight Republicans who are absolutely rigid in their thinking, have relatively little education, and offer nothing more than the same litany of dogma we hear endlessly from Fox News.  Usually the really inept ones are from the Tea Party but the GOP has been collecting them as well and there's a parade of conservative candidates who could not pass a high school science test.

There's some measure of encouragement in my friend's view of these candidates as it would be most unfortunate if people who really know the GOP platform and history started accepting these lightweights.

As to the definition of 'lightweight,' the Tea Party has been saying for years it wants to defend the Constitution but the only constitutional amendment that's been considered in anything like modern times was the Equal Rights Amendment and that was killed in the eighties.  These candidates couldn't pass a science test and they couldn't pass a history test either.


Another friend of open political persuasion offered that the candidates are representative of a generation with singularly poor education.  As evidence he offered a survey in which college kids at a Texas university were asked who won the Civil War.  Out of half a dozen or so kids, only one knew.  The same was true for the others in a series of obvious questions about American history and the kids got all of them incorrect ... but all of them knew Snooki is / was on "Jersey Shore."

The point of the survey is clear enough but I don't have much reason to believe it.  How do I know they didn't edit out the kids who responded intelligently.  Also, it's not my experience with the kids I know personally as all of them stay aggressively informed.  Therefore, dismissing the generation as a whole doesn't explain it to me.


People sometimes refer to the 'dumbing down of America' but the average IQ of Americans didn't suddenly drop.  However, for some reason it doesn't seem to matter any more.  One example of that is the anti-vaxx crowd as their ability to ignore facts and reality is one of the highest of any group.  Another one is the Fox News fiasco on Benghazi in which everything they said was proven false and yet nothing changes.


Americans are not dumb and yet are doing some remarkably dumb things.  It remains a mystery and this is hardly a Mission from God with me, it's just really unusual to see such incredibly uninformed politicians at the national level so I'm curious.

No comments: