Stupidworld

This has really been the political Summer of Stupidity in this country. It's so depressing to see so many people being as stupid as they can possibly be, and not having one whit of shame or regret about it.

Last month we had the ridiculous spectacle of the town hall meetings held by members of Congress in their home districts during the August recess. Programmed by right-wing talk radio dirtbags such as Rush "Mount Flabmore" Limbaugh and the obviously mentally ill Glenn Beck, the legions of their illiterate followers fanned out across this nation and turned what had usually been a relatively civilized forum for the exchange of ideas into a hysterical shouting match, with fat, sweaty Midwesterners screaming at the top of their lungs to get their own obnoxious ideas across and suppress anyone else with an opposing view. Their conservative puppet-masters conveniently omitted the basic concept that those tactics are barely appropriate for belligerent three-year-olds who have been denied their basic right to Hostess Twinkies, but for adults to indulge in this behavior instead of confronting the deadly-serious issue of out-of-control health care costs, it is not only obnoxious and shameful but also extremely self-centered and disrespectful. How incredibly sad and pathetic those people are, who can find no other way to make themselves heard other than to shout down any opinion other than theirs. They claim to be "patriotic" but in fact what they are doing is a very un-American thing: keeping others from expressing their viewpoint through bullying and intimidation. They are ignorant right-wing dupes with tiny brains and big mouths. Throw in the selfish, piggish attitude a lot of them have about "I have health insurance and I'm sort of happy with it, so screw everyone else" and you become acutely aware of how many idiotic, mean-spirited and utterly classless people infest every town and city in this country.

A by-product of all these loud-mouthed morons is how "socialism" has become such a conservative buzz-word. All of a sudden health-care overhaul has become a thinly-disguised attempt to turn the world's most powerful democracy into a socialist state. Crazed old people are seen carrying signs around screaming "No Government Health Plan!" HELLO? Do any of these senile old geezers even have a clue as to what Medicare is?? Medicare IS government-run health care! You want government out of your health care? Fine - then RIP UP YOUR MEDICARE CARDS! I usually have a fair amount of sympathy for the elderly because I will be one of them very soon. It's okay to be old, but it's NOT okay to be old and stupid, and that's what a lot of them are. They believe whatever nonsensical hysteria they hear on the news media and start stampeding like a panicked herd of lemmings.

Even worse than that was the reaction to President Obama's speech to school students yesterday. The right-wing in this country is so completely obsessed with sabotaging everything that Obama does that they somehow spread the story around that the President was going to talk to school children and indoctrinate them into his "socialistic policies." For God's sake, it was the PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES encouraging school children to stay in school and do well! What the hell is "socialistic" about that?? Instead of focusing in on this message, which normal people consider to be kind of important, conservatives made a big to-do about children being "forced" to listen to the speech and how the President was going to use it to make political points. In many places parents were given the choice of sending their children to school or keeping them home, as if the parents were smart enough to make that decision. I heartily applaud a Chicago school official who got on TV and said there will be no "parental choice" when it comes to the speech, children will come to school and they will LISTEN to the speech, and if parents objected they can just get over it. Instead of letting the children see and hear an inspirational message from the very articulate Leader of the Free World, the only thing a lot of them saw was the ignorance and bigotry of their own parents. How freaking lovely.

Then you have the abysmally stupid and detestable Sarah Palin who automatically starts blathering enormous amounts of crap if she gets within ten feet of a media outlet, just like a toilet that keeps backing up sewage into America's bathrooms. On the eve of the President's address on health care to a joint session of Congress, she inexplicably brought up her reviled and widely-discredited notion of "death panels" which in her pathetic little mind will be set up to decide if terminally ill or elderly people will live or die. I'm not going to go into what a despicable, loathsome waste of human flesh Sarah Palin is, because I've made that perfectly clear in at least six other postings on this blog, but if there is any person who deserves to burn in hell solely on the merits of the magnitude and depth of her all-consuming stupidity, she is that one. How someone so incredibly MORONIC can keep spouting her idiocy on a national stage is completely baffling to me, and as far as I'm concerned shows how broken and damaged the national media is, and how very badly it serves to advance informed debate and intelligent reasoning in this country. I rank anything Palin says on a par with those two other pointless media whores, Jon and Kate Gosselin.

As if all that wasn't bad enough, we can throw in the birther controversy earlier this summer, where so many unapologetically misinformed, brainless people got convinced that Obama is not a U.S. citizen. Add to that the usual detritus that regularly washes up on our pop-culture shoreline, where people who should know better insist on doing really ridiculous, embarrassing things without any indication that they've given the slightest amount of thought or consideration for how it's going to look on the world stage. Aided and abetted by a soundbite-driven media who are much more interested in publicizing dumbness and bad behavior instead of reasoned, thoughtful action, it does seem that so often the really stupid, ignorant people are taking over. And that will spell the end to this country quicker than any Al-Qaeda terrorist could ever hope for.