Dumbing Down of Republicans

Today Donald Trump, a human road apple, is a leading contender for the Republican nomination for President. Trump's issue has been President Obama's "missing" long form birth certificate (now made public after the President's special request). This must be the dumbest political issue of my lifetime.

I've been thinking about how things got so bad.

Until 2010 the Republican Party existed as a conduit to pass laws that would transfer money from poor people to rich people. It took smart Ivy League lawyers to pull off this fraud. As recently as George W. Bush that was still the party's core function. But Republicans could not run on theft from the poor as an issue.

To win elections, the Republicans had to mislead voters, and, in theory, the less informed the voters were, the better the Republicans would do. We're familiar with how they went about dumbing down voters: Fox News, a stress on racism, laws to hamper registration of young voters, defunding public schools, etc. The problem with this 30 year campaign is that it turned into a slippery slope. The Republican party ended up way too dumb. Now it has produced the Tea Party (right wing populists), who run Republican policy. Wall Street is appalled--the Teabaggers are on a path to destroy the American government and the world economy, because they know nothing. They don't listen to the corporate oligarchy that manages America.

The Wall Street Republicans have a problem.

An example of current stupidity is the attempt to appeal the California court decision against Proposition 8 (forbidding gay marriage) on the grounds that the judge who made it was gay. Here is the reasoning. The judge was gay. The issue was gay rights. Therefore, the judge was biased.

This is an interesting new standard without legal precedent. Let's see how if might work.

If the Prop 8 judge had been straight, that would also have been a bias. Only a bisexual judge would have been fair.

In cases involving racism,unbiased multiracial judges would be required. In cases about the rights of women, only transgendered judges could render evenhanded verdicts. Cases involving religion would be tried by agnostics. And so on.

I doubt if this will catch on.

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What the Republicans did was follow Wall Street Karl Rove's strategy, which was to maximize the stupid vote. The stupid soon took over the Republican primaries, to Rove's dismay, defeated Wall Street incumbents and elected raving loonies to public office.

What does this illustrate? The law of unintended consequences.

Gary Goss