Rocket surgeons: Republicans and epic stupidity

(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Is it just me, or are these guys just epically stupid?

Try this one:

Imagine you’re a junior-high math teacher. Imagine you’ve given your students a complex problem involving several (for them) complex terms, detailed calculations and high-level reasoning. You’ve instructed them to solve the problem and to show their work.

Imagine, then, that when the students turn in their papers, one of them – we’ll call him George – hands you a sheet with nothing on it but a 12-digit number: 700,000,000,000. The answer is wrong, but you’re intrigued as to how he might have arrived at it. Only problem is, there is nothing else on the sheet – George has not shown his work.

Being the open-minded and fair teacher that you are, you want to give George a chance to explain himself, to make clear to you how he arrived at his number, maybe to “sell” his answer a bit. You want him to show his work.

“George,” you say, “how did you arrive at this answer?”

George – never the sharpest tool in the shed, like most of the kids he hangs around with – just grins and says,

“It’s not based on any particular data point. I just wanted to choose a really large number.”

You just cannot make this shit up. Every day, I become more and more convinced that what’s going on with Republicans is just a huge piece of performance art that the studios were required to create as part of the writers’ strike settlement, so that the folks working for Letterman, Leno, Stewart, Colbert, et al., wouldn’t run out of material before the election.

DOES ANYONE SERIOUSLY THINK WE SHOULD BELIEVE ANYTHING THESE PEOPLE TELL US, ABOUT ANYTHING?

Then there’s Sarah Palin. Ahh, Sarah. Forget the moose-in-the-headlights look she gave Charlie Gibson when asked about the Bush Doctrine – didja see her interview with Katie Couric? It was painful. I mean, I literally could not watch the whole thing. This woman gives stupid people a bad name.

It’s evident from watching this that the RNC handlers have at least trained Sarah that rather than being silent when she gets a question for which she can’t formulate an intelligent answer (which is – surprise! – often), she should just repeat again and again the same 2-sentence talking point, but maybe modify an adjective or an adverb here or there. Sorta like – wouldn’cha know it? – junior high school again, yeah: “Ooh, maybe if I go to my thesaurus and throw in a few big words, no one will notice that I don’t know anything about what I’m talking about, such as.”

These people are not smart. What’s worse, they think Americans are stupid, too. And the man who just “suspended” his campaign – WTF? “Stop the campaign, I wanna get off”?? – is probably the dullest tool in the shed. Still a tool – just the dullest one.

To the searching question, “Mac or PC?” McCain came up with this very telling answer:

“Neither – I am a [sic], um, illiterate that [sic] has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance that I can get.”

Let’s face it: the man is an idiot.

Let’s face it – the man is dumber than a sack of hammers.

Let’s face it, the man literally does not know Shi’ite from Shinola.

This is the man whom some people believe should be the Most Powerful Person In The World, the man who would determine the fate of much of the planet for the next four or eight years. He thinks Czechoslovakia still exists. He thinks Putin is the president of Germany. He thinks Spain is not our friend. Hell, even McCain’s likely Secretary of Defense wouldn’t recognize Israel.

This is a guy who thinks the Senate Commerce Committee oversees every aspect of the American economy. This is a guy who thinks the president has the ability to fire the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is the guy who, repeatedly and emphatically, up until a week or two ago, thought the economy was doing great!.

This is a guy who thinks a convicted felon who describes in detail how to kill federal agents and who praises the methods of Nazi Germany is someone to be proud of for his adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great.

This is a guy who thinks you’re “middle-class” if you make $4.8 million a year, like his wife. This is a guy whose wife doesn’t even trust him with her money.

Forget about him being old, forget about him having a fuse shorter than his memory, forget about his skirt-chasing, adultery, marrying for money, and misogyny, forget about his lobbyist whoring, forget about his having no ideas about foreign policy that don’t begin with the Beach Boys and end with ordnance (and who wants to trust McCain with ordnance, anyway?) – let’s just talk about how downright dumb he is.

And it’s not just that McCain is of average intelligence, and therefore looks dumb compared to the Democratic candidate – oh, and the Libertarian candidate, the Green candidate and the other party’s candidates – it’s that he is actively stupid.

There are only two other possible explanations for McCain’s utterances: one of them is prevarication, the other is senility.  

(Can I say that?)

This is a guy who proclaimed to great fanfare that the economic “crisis” was so urgent and important that he would suspend his presidential campaign – yet he hadn’t even bothered to read the THREE-PAGE bailout plan proposed by the Treasury Secretary.

Three. Pages.

Can you imagine that middle-school kid proclaiming that he hadn’t read his THREE-PAGE homework assignment?

But, again, let’s face it: John McCain has never been the brightest kid in class. The man graduated 5th from the bottom in a class of 899. That’s Mind-Boggling Failure. That’s Failure on a scope so grand that even a chimp at a typewriter can only dream of it.

Think about that – that is no small accomplishment. Think about your own high school class: what was the kid like who graduated fifth from the bottom? And that was just high school.

McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, managed it at the Naval Academy. So if one can assume that one’s GPA at Annapolis might just possibly benefit by one being the son and grandson of admirals, it’s a safe bet that John Sidney McCain’s GPA would have reflected whatever such benefit was possible –  and still the guy graduated fifth from the bottom of a group of 899.

Imagine, if you will, standing in a line of 899 people – and then imagine being the fifth guy from the end of that line – that’s John McCain.

When George Bush or John McCain or Sarah Palin speaks, everyone within earshot is made a little dumber for having listened.

Now, look – no one is saying you have to be a Rhodes Scholar or a Nobel laureate or even president of the Harvard Law Review in order to be president – or even vice president – of the United States.

After all – it’s not rocket surgery, as my friend’s wife has been known to say.

And that’s a good thing, too, for the Republicans, because after years of a right-wing moratorium on intelligence, the GOP’s supply of rocket surgeons is down to almost none.

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