It's Not the Heat, It's the Stupidity - Democratic Underground

NanceGreggs

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Sun May-31-09 11:16 PM
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It's Not the Heat, It's the Stupidity

Edited on Sun May-31-09 11:37 PM by NanceGreggs

If you’ve ever wondered how the now almost-defunct Republican party has ever been able to get any of their ilk voted into any office above the position of dog-catcher, one need only look at their traditional constituents: the Stupid.

Unfortunately, The Stupid have been with us a long time and the GOP, recognizing their numbers and their penchant for being riled-up enough to get out and vote, took advantage of – well, people Stupid enough to be taken advantage of.

For decades, The Stupid have been coddled and catered to – made to feel that Abject Stupidity is a virtue, something to be admired and aspired to. Just give The Stupid a completely unreasonable reason to feel somehow superior to the elitists who do things like read books, inform themselves, get an education – and you’re going to wind up with people who not only vote against their own best interests, they’ll even drag their canines to the polls to vote for a dog-catcher running on the platform of “the only Good dog is a Dead dog”.

Such has been the insidious nature of the Republican agenda, where “I’m With Stupid” isn’t just a silly T-shirt, but the slogan of an entire political party.

Appreciating that The Stupid are easily led, the Republican party has never failed to capture their attention and hold them to its teat like a suckling infant – only to remind them that something as natural as milk-filled teats are the work of the devil, never meant to be proffered in the first instance. That’s cause the Bible tells ‘em so – the same Bible that embraces torture, condones corporate greed, and provides the underpinnings to support the concept that “turning the other cheek” actually means “nuke ‘em if they disagree”.

Of course, The Stupid have needed to be kept stupid, which means a mainstream media that caters to the lowest common denominator – i.e. “Stupid is as Stupid sees on the nightly news” – lest an actual fact get through here and there, upsetting the Stupidity apple-cart.

And then there are the “made to order” talking heads – Hannity, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Malkin – who cater to The Stupid with a fervor that flies in the face of things like journalistic integrity (hey, remember THAT?) and simply tells The Stupid what they want to hear: You’re not out of work due to outsourcing, you’re out of work due to those illegal aliens sneaking over the Mexican border in the dead of night who are showing up as CEOs of major corporations the next morning, and deciding that your job is expendable. Sorry if you can’t take a joke – and the punchline is hysterical in the original Mexicanish.

But there’s something the GOP, in all of its finite wisdom, didn’t count on: the smartening up of the American citizenry.

They never saw it coming. Never planned for the fact that people would actually notice that the country was plunged into debt before Barack Obama (D) took office, that their jobs disappeared under a G.W. Bush (R) administration, that the much-touted cooperation of foreign nations in fighting the “War on Terra” would be better served by an administration that garnered world respect rather then global guffaws, that democracy doesn’t fare well when secrecy and lies supplant transparency of government and from-the-hip honesty – that a president who strives to find solutions rather than create more problems might be just what the citizenry ordered.

Yes, my friends, much to the chagrin of the GOP, The Stupid are smartening up. They’re beginning to realize that flag-pins worn in the lapel don’t equal patriotism, that ”Support the Troops” bumperstickers don’t address the problems faced by their back-from-Iraq military neighbors, that universal healthcare actually makes sense, that CEOs pulling in seven-digit incomes while the employees of their corporations struggle to make ends meet is not representative of a healthy capitalist society, that raping defenceless women and children is not business-as-usual in wartime – and that, most importantly, the people who encourage all of the above are not on their side.

It was bound to happen, sooner or later. The Stupid would, despite the best efforts of the GOP and the MSM, eventually get smart. They would inevitably realize that what they were being told and what they were seeing with their own eyes and ears were two totally different things.

It’s a sad day for the Republican Party (who many of us will someday remind our grandchildren was a political force that existed, once-upon-a-time.)

But it’s a great day for America – a little damaged, a little tattered, a little worse for wear – but on its way to bigger and better things, now that The Stupid are a vanishing breed.