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Thursday, May 19. 2011
Pegging the Stupid Meter
Sometimes, someone says something that is so extreme, so clearly ignorant, so stupid, you think it’s a joke of some kind. It has to be! Why would anyone say something that is so profoundly wrong? Well, actually, there is an answer to that question.Some have agendas and they figure there are at least a few lost souls who will believe and agree with the stupid statement. Like the claim, by many Republicans who are enacting Jim Crow style voter laws, that there is wide-spread voter fraud taking place all over America. There actually hasn’t been any instances of wide spread voter fraud uncovered anywhere, either by Republican or Democratic led Justice Departments, not in at least 50 years, but that is the claim Republicans use to disenfranchise otherwise eligible voters. Let’s hope the Supreme Court starts shooting down those new Jim Crow laws — soon! Before the 2012 elections.
These Republican-held legislatures are doing something so wrong it seems inconceivable, yet they are doing it. But wait, the stupid meter hasn’t been pegged yet, not by a long shot.
Step aside for Newt Gingrich. Now that he’s in the running to be the Republican nominee for president, he’s walking back — no, running back — comments he made on Meet the Press this past Sunday when he said the individual mandate in the federal health insurance law was a good thing and Rep Paul Ryan’s budget plan — with its plan to end Medicare — extreme.
So, on Wednesday Newt made a declaration on FoxNews that no one could quote anything he said on Meet the Press in TV commercials because it is all falsehoods. All of it? Everything he said? And if people use clips from his interview with David Gregory, what does Mr. Gingrich propose to do? Gingrich can’t keep people from quoting his statements made on a TV show broadcast on the airways!
That’s a pretty stupid thing to say, Mr. Gingrich, but thanks to your campaign’s press secretary, Rick Tyler, the stupid meter gets cranked up a little more.
In a reply to the Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone, Tyler wrote this: “The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.”
Is it possible Tyler meant “intimidated” instead of “intimated”? Doesn’t matter really, after reading that I had to wonder if Rick Tyler had a previous career writing graphic novels — comic books in essence. There’s a blaring and melodramatic metaphor … wait … no, there are at least two blaring and melodramatic metaphors in every sentence.
“Out of the billowing smoke …” You got to admit, if you like action movies and the graphic novels that are their inspiration, that is a great line! I’d bet Gingrich loves this guy.
On the other hand, Rick Tyler comes close to pegging the stupid meter, if you’re the type of adult who left comic books behind when you graduated into Junior High or Middle School.
Ah, but Rick Tyler and his boss Newt Gingrich don’t quite get that needle past the red zone. On just about any other day, barring an appearance by Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck and Donald Trump, those are about the dumbest, most stupid things a politician and his flunky could say publicly.But not on Wednesday, May 18, 2011. Nope. Neither the Republican-run state legislatures nor Newt Gingrich and his lackey Rick Tyler, could possibly out-stupid what was said by another hopeful candidate for the Republican nomination: former Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum.
Just an aside here: a couple weeks ago, right after Santorum announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination, Jon Stewart suggested we Google the name — the word — “Santorum” on the Internets. So I did. O Dear!
Back to Rick Santorum and his really, really stupid statement. It was a frothy appeal to the neo-con Teabagger element in the Republican Party, that very vocal part that believes President George W. Bush is responsible for getting Usama bin Laden.
Despite the facts to the contrary, as presented the C.I.A. Director Leon Panetta, these people believe torture was the key reason we were finally able to locate and kill the terrorist leader. Rick Santorum quite publicly came out and echoed that sentiment.
You might be scratching your head wondering who Santorum is, although, if you Googled his last name you might have a rather frothy image of what Santorum is …
And Santorum insists torture is not only okay, it works. While on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program Tuesday Santorum defended using torture and insisted waterboarding is how intelligence agents got information on the courier that led to Usama bin Laden. And then he said the most stupid thing anyone in public office has said, at least in recent years. Santorum pegged the stupid meter.“Everything I’ve read shows that we would not have gotten this information as to who this man was if it had not been gotten information from people who were subject to enhanced interrogation,” Santorum said, in reference to the courier that led U.S. intelligence to Usama bin Laden. “And so this idea that we didn’t ask that question while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was being waterboarded, he [McCain] doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works. I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative.”
The italics are mine to emphasize the most stupid part of that statement.
John McCain, who has often spoken of his years as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, doesn’t understand how “enhanced interrogation” — torture — works? Really? From a guy who has never been tortured, never even been in an interrogation when torture was being used — a guy who hasn’t served in the military — wants us to believe a guy who was tortured doesn’t understand how it works?
To any rational person, Republican or otherwise, someone who has been subjected to torture would understand it all too painfully well. But in the fantasy world people like Santorum populate, facts are not real.
Remember during Bush’s (43) first term when Karl Rove told reporter Ron Susskind guys like him were proud members of the reality-based community? People who “believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
McCain’s long-time aid Mark Salter responded on Facebook, saying, “For pure, blind stupidity, nobody beats Santorum. In my 20 years in the Senate, I never met a dumber member, which he reminded me of today.”
McCain’s daughter put it in even more entertaining terms in this tweet: “Rick Santorum telling my father doesn’t know about torture is like Carrot Top telling LeBron James he doesn’t know about basketball.”
There’s not much in which Senator McCain and I agree, but this I do know: when it comes to torture, or “enhanced interrogation” if that’s what you want to call it, there’s no more experienced expert than the senator from Arizona. Saying John McCain doesn’t understand torture is the most stupid thing anyone, especially a political candidate, could possibly say.Well, maybe not. The stupid just got deeper when Santorum said his comments shouldn’t be taken as an insult to Senator McCain and his service as a Naval aviator. Really? Santorum just diminished McCain’s five years as a POW, inferred it has no relevance. How do people like Santorum think? Well, maybe that’s it, he doesn’t, at least not before he speaks.
Dude, if you’re not going to apologize to Senator McCain for the insult, then shut the fuck up! Or not. This can only get more entertaining! We may need a new stupid meter.
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