Idiocracy

Recently Keith Olberman referred to Republican leaders as resembling "dogs chasing a car."

Dogs chasing cars, yapping, aren't dogs at their best. Dogs can't take on cars. They sometimes get caught under the wheels. Their tremendous effort is wildly brainless, and so dangerous you'd rather not watch.

The last forty years have witnessed a steady decline in intelligence among Republican leaders, and now the party is headed by people who seem genuinely clueless. That didn't happen by chance. Step by step, over the years, the Republican Party has been moved to the Right when centrist politicians lost in party primaries. Finally they fell off a cliff.

At this point, to win a Republican primary, you have to agree that the world is 10,000 years old, that climate science is a Marxist plot, that Hawaii is Kenya, that corporations are people, and that, although the government supplies you with social security and medicare, you stand alone, a proudly free individual who doesn't need government (except for food, clothing, shelter, water, safety, highway maintenance, and entertainment). You take for granted that progressives exist as a form of unmotivated absolute evil. You're willing to make the planet uninhabitable if you can get rich in the process.

To believe the above you must be mighty dumb, but American politics has long been shot through with absurdities, including the belief that slavery was a good thing for people with dark skin, and proof of this was to be found in the Christian Bible. Learning to accept that rubbish built a level of political lunacy into the South that might last until the end of time, which some expect in a month or two.

The running dogs of Transnational Corporations are seen most clearly in elected leaders who continue to defend BP in ways that even BP finds embarrassing. When it comes to electing stupid people to congress, we have finally reached bottom. And that's the way some of us like it. Some hope to live in an Idiocracy.

--Gary Goss