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January 5 - January 10, 2023
don’t care much about the grades a politician got in school because they’re not a reliable predicter of governing ability. Franklin Delano Roosevelt somehow managed to lead the nation out of the Great Depression and to victory in World War II despite his C average, a GPA that today would keep him from getting an interview at McKinsey.I What made Roosevelt a successful president, among other gifts, was his intellectual curiosity, which enabled him to absorb vast amounts of information necessary to resolve unprecedented crises.
I think the person running the country should be smarter than I am. We’ve just lived through the alternative, and it was only good for the liquor industry.
During the Ridicule stage, ignorance was a magnet for mockery, a serious flaw that could kill a political career. Consequently, dumb politicians had to pretend to be smart.
During the Acceptance stage, ignorance mutated into something more agreeable: a sign that a politician was authentic, down-to-earth, and a “normal person.” Consequently, dumb politicians felt free to appear dumb.
Finally, during the Celebration stage—the ordeal we’re enduring right now—ignorance has become preferable to knowledge, dunces are exalted over experts, and a candidate can win a seat in Congress after blaming wildfires on Jewish space lasers. Being ill-informed is now a litmus test; consequently, smart politicians must pretend to be dumb.
Got it: The most important need in international relations is an attack from outer space.
The lesson here: when someone calls you “a quick study,” you don’t know shit.
Hurrah for not sucking as badly as you were expected to suck!
if you don’t have facts to support your case, fear and hate are handy substitutes.
They favored small government, but wanted government to play an active role in kicking immigrants out of the country. They wanted fewer handouts for the young, the poor, and people of color, but wanted government to keep its hands off their own Medicare and Social Security. They worshipped the Constitution, but selectively: they revered the Second Amendment, which allowed them to own guns, but weren’t so keen on the First, which let Muslims build mosques.
Ultimately, there was only one governing principle uniting this unwieldy group: the conviction that Barack Hussein Obama was Satan. (Even on this topic, though, there was some disagreement, as Tea Partiers split over whether the president was a communist, a Nazi, or both.)
“American scientific companies are crossbreeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains.”
Delaware voters might have wondered whether science could help O’Donnell grow a similar feature.
Brownback’s ringing defense of the “human person” raised the weird possibility that there might also be a non-human one. A dolphin person?)
The Heritage Foundation wound up ousting DeMint in 2017, apparently deciding that a think tank should be run by someone more experienced at thinking.
conservative commentator Meghan McCain was moved to call Bachmann “the thinking man’s Sarah Palin.” Asked to explain her reasoning, McCain responded, “She’s more smarter.”XIV
(Obama wants you to be educated like him—what a dick!)
And so we must salute Romney as an unsung innovator in the Age of Ignorance. His valiant attempt to shape-shift from valedictorian to numbskull would be aped by a horde of cynical Ivy League–educated Republicans a few years later, in the thick of the Celebration stage.
In the first stage, Ridicule, dumb politicians had to pretend to be smart. In the second stage, Acceptance, dumb politicians felt free to seem dumb.
Today, in the third stage, Celebration, smart politicians must pretend to be dumb.
we must pay homage to all the ignoramuses we’ve explored so far. Had they not danced the limbo under an ever-descending bar, Trump’s presidency would have been unthinkable. Thanks to them, it was inevitable.
Maybe he feared that, confronted with his sky-high GPA and scores, we losers and haters would feel stupid and insecure.
“I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things,”
his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, called him “a fucking moron.”
Actually, Murdoch called him a “fucking idiot.”
“By every metric and methodology tested, Donald Trump’s vocabulary and grammatical structure is significantly more simple, and less diverse, than any President since Herbert Hoover,”
When it comes to history, Trump’s most common errors involve (1) when events happened, and (2) what happened.
Trump’s followers apply a similar rule to his behavior: When Trump does it, that means that it is not idiotic.
We happily pay for the chance to suspend reality.
how did a guy who’s so bad at so much become so famous?
Asked about Dubya, Trump says that he is “very, very saddened by the fact that he certainly doesn’t seem like Albert Einstein.”
The Apprentice convinced millions that Donald J. Trump was just the right badass to bring back the 1980s and kick the world’s losers to the curb.
In the Ridicule stage, the Gipper had shown that performing talent could triumph over knowledge and competence; to prove the point, however, he still went to the trouble of uttering complete sentences.
Now, in the Celebration stage, Donald Trump could ditch that quaint practice. He announced his candidacy for president by riffing like a Dadaist poet.
The message was clear: we don’t know what’s happening, but it’s got to stop!
“Let’s Make America Great Again” at least presented the illusion of being a collective invitation, even if it was a disingenuous one, since it didn’t extend to anyone outside the all-white cast of Reagan’s campaign ads. “Make America Great Again” doesn’t even pretend to be an invitation. It’s a command.
her Jabberwocky-like endorsement speech, Palin did what few would have dreamed possible: she made Donald J. Trump seem like a man of few words.
If Americans were looking for someone less qualified than Clinton, Trump was more qualified at being unqualified.
(In a possible homage to Trump’s punctuation skills, Spicer said “period” in the middle of a sentence.)
What did she mean, exactly, by “alternative facts”? Maybe an alternative fact was like an alternative band: something not many people had heard of, but really cool if you knew about it? At any rate, there were many more to come.
Though mainstream news outlets highlighted Trump’s wild excursions from the truth, such criticism didn’t erode his support, for a simple reason: his supporters didn’t get their news from mainstream news outlets.
in Celebration voters were free to choose only the facts they agreed with.
The message was clear: a caravan of marauders was coming to destroy our way of life, including our right to capitalize any word we want.
In the summer of 2021, Florida became responsible for a whopping one-fifth of the entire nation’s new COVID-19 cases.
“Anybody who says it was unrelated to the intimidation and violence floating around there is not telling the truth. I saw it with my own eyes. Violence, fear and physical intimidation affected the outcome of a lawful elections process.”
I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”
In light of Trump and the GOP’s long-standing love affair with mob violence, the insurrection at the Capitol seems less like an outlier and more like a sequel.
the views that people find abhorrent in Trump make him not the antithesis of Reagan but his rightful successor.
At a moment when Mike Pence seemed to be losing his mind, Dan Quayle was there to remind him what a waste it is to lose one’s mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful.
our emotional, not-very-rational engagement with politics renders even the best-educated among us capable of voting like dopes.I This is true no matter where you sit on the political spectrum.
