This rant concerns the stupidity of the average American. That's right, I said it, most people are stupid. Average people are even more stupid. How does that work? Well, everyone has some good ideas and some terrible ideas, but if you average them all together, there are just bad ideas. In business, bad ideas die a Darwinian death. In politics, bad ideas are elected or enacted as compromises between extreme but creative ideas.
So why does the average person get to vote? I guess democracy has worked well in practice in the past when people generally voted on the recommendations of newspaper editors (who tended to be more intelligent and better informed than average).
But in this day of excessive television coverage and extreme scrutiny of sensational issues such as sex and religion (neither of which is relevant to 97.3% of issues), people tend to vote for the politician who looks good on TV and tends not to make mistakes. Well, you know what that gets you? Mediocrity. Imagine if Babe Ruth or Michael Jordan had been more afraid of making mistakes than intent on success. What sort of athletes would they have been?
Still, as Sir Winston Churchill has said,
...democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. Maybe there's a better form of government that hasn't been tried, but
maybe if the average
'tard would stop watching American Idol and start paying a-fucking-ttention to what's going on, democracy might work a little better.
We should let our politicians make mistakes. If they make somewhat insensitive remarks, we should let them slide a bit. If they misspeak, give them a pass. If they have associated with undesirables, let it go. On the other hand, if a candidate shows real inexpertise over important issues, consistently demonstrates a lack of intellectual ability, or puts forth unwise policies, let 'em have it with both barrels.
Let's look at some examples of faux pas and categorize them
Slip Up (don't cast aspersion on this brilliant leader) or
Fuck Up (you are a dumbass who shouldn't be elected).
| John Edwards' $400 Hair Cut | Slip Up | Obviously |
| Bill Clinton bangs Gennifer Flowers | Slip Up | Or maybe Go Bill! |
| Bill Clinton probes Monica Lewinsky with a cigar | Slip Up | Dude is freaky! |
| Ken Starr probes Bill Clinton with Subpoenas | Fuck Up | Ken Starr has contributed to society about as much as Star Jones. |
| George Bush uses the word "nucular" | Slip Up | He watches The Simpsons too much? |
| George Bush can't make his verbs and subjects agree | Fuck Up | Me fail English? That’s unpossible. |
| Barack Obama goes to a church with an insane preacher | Slip Up | Aren't all preachers insane at some level? And don't politicians generally hang out with the worst sort? |
| Barack Obama makes a deal to take public funding and then goes back it | Fuck Up | Dishonest, but then $100s of millions would be tempting |
| John McCain confuses Sunni with Shia | Fuck Up | Okay, plenty of people could make that mistake, but none of them should be in charge of the free world either. |
So think about the issues and when a controversy starts to dominate basic cable, try to consider what it really means. Is it a slip up or a fuck up?
