Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

by Andy Borowitz

People sometimes call our nation “the American experiment.” Recently, though, we’ve been lab rats in another, perverse American experiment, seemingly designed to answer this question: Who’s the most ignorant person the United States is willing to elect?

But while Democratic dopes have wreaked their share of havoc, the scale of their destruction doesn’t equal that of their Republican counterparts. Once Democrats gin up a two-trillion-dollar war to find nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, ignore and then politicize a virus that causes nearly a million needless deaths, and attempt a violent overthrow of the U.S. government, I’ll get cracking on a book about them.

Like Chuck Yeager shattering the sound barrier, Reagan tested the outer limits of vacuity; the dullards he inspired all stand on his denim-clad shoulders. Today, more than four decades after he entered the White House and took his first nap, his disciples worship him like a prophet, an oracle, the Yoda of cluelessness.

By the time Reagan became governor of California, in 1967, intellectuals were his piñatas of choice, with the students and faculty at UC Berkeley a regular target for bashing. In his most damning broadside, he said that California’s taxpayers shouldn’t be “subsidizing intellectual curiosity.” Harsh!

Reagan had every opportunity to become well-informed, but his extraordinary talent for closed-mindedness shielded him from unwanted enlightenment. The ideas inside his head were as immovable as the Brylcreemed hair on top of it. Once he’d collected those ideas—in the 1950s—he didn’t feel compelled to add any more. He had only three: (1) Communism = Bad; (2) Government = Bad; (3) Capitalism = Good. (Trees = Bad deserves an honorable mention.)

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Unlike Ford, who tripped over facts, Reagan avoided the annoying problem of facts altogether. When, in 1988, Reagan misquoted John Adams’s aphorism “Facts are stubborn things” as “Facts are stupid things,” it sounded as if he’d stumbled on the perfect title for his memoirs.

Reagan demonstrated that, in the hands of a talented TV performer, one joke could sink a thousand facts. But he had enjoyed another advantage as he cruised to victory in 1980: an all-star roster of morally dubious advisers. His gang of goons included Roy Cohn, the disgraced former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and three hard-charging political consultants, Roger Ailes, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort. It was hard to imagine another Republican presidential candidate assembling such a team, or coming up with a campaign slogan as winning as Reagan’s: “Let’s Make America Great Again.”

Traveling with Quayle, Molly Ivins wasn’t wowed. “I found him dumber than advertised,” she said. “If you put that man’s brain in a bumblebee, it would fly backwards.”

After W. is shown hitting fly balls for Little Leaguers, the scene shifts to voter testimonials that lack the spontaneity customarily found in hostage videos.

As Dubya and Reagan both showed, if you don’t have facts to support your case, fear and hate are handy substitutes.

Though Bachmann was clearly out of her depth when discussing historical figures in New England, she fared no better on her home turf. Promoting her candidacy on Fox News, she boasted that she shared a birthplace, Waterloo, Iowa, with the legendary celluloid cowboy John Wayne. Embarrassingly, eagle-eyed fact-checkers realized that Bachmann had confused the birthplace of John Wayne with the onetime home of John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer who became known as the Killer Clown.

But it didn’t matter that the story was false. Sometimes false stories are what we want, because they provide our lives with meaning. That’s why so many people are drawn to professional wrestling—not to mention folklore and mythology.

Because stories explain the world to us, we’ll believe them even if they aren’t true. For this reason, Plato realized that stories could be big trouble. Murphy notes, “Plato believed that rational argument could not take hold in a culture until all storytellers were forcibly expelled.”