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

by Andy Borowitz

(It’s also possible that Mencken didn’t think one’s support for racial equality was desirable, since his posthumously published diary revealed him to be racist, anti-Semitic, and pro-Nazi. In other words, a very fine person.)

“You could walk through Ronald Reagan’s deepest thoughts and not get your ankles wet.”

republic who saw his election as a chance to get some rest.” He could’ve used all that downtime to acquire the knowledge necessary to fulfill his constitutional duties, but his laziness and incuriosity put the kibosh on that.

As the Sound of Music incident suggests, Reagan’s interest in briefing materials might have peaked when he acquired Jimmy Carter’s debate prep. Frustrated by his aversion to reading, cabinet members resorted to bringing him up to speed—or, more accurately, half speed—by showing him videos and cartoons about the subjects at hand. But even these Oval Office versions of Schoolhouse Rock! bored Reagan, who spent briefings doodling.

with.” When Brokaw noted that he’d be considerably older than French president Giscard d’Estaing, Reagan replied, “Who?” (After Reagan was elected, Brokaw, demonstrating a gift for understatement, called him “a gravely under-informed president.”) After a half-hour briefing by the Lebanese foreign minister about his nation’s factional conflicts, Reagan’s only contribution was “You know, your nose looks just like Danny Thomas’s.”

in a constant state of wonder about the world around him. He called a 1982 trip to Latin America “real fruitful,” having gleaned this mind-boggling insight: “They’re all individual countries.”

After Reagan suggested that Brazil could be “a bridge” for the U.S. in South America, the official noted, “If you look at a map, you will see that we cannot be detached from the South American continent. We are not a bridge from South America; we are in South America.” It’s possible the Brazilian was still sore after Reagan, raising a glass at a state dinner in Brasília, offered a toast to “the people of Bolivia.” Belatedly recognizing his goof, he tried to explain it away by saying that Bolivia was where he was headed next. His next stop was Colombia; Bolivia wasn’t on his itinerary.

devotion to the government of apartheid South Africa, possibly because he rarely asked questions about the place. When he did, the question was rhetorical, as in “Can we abandon this country that has stood beside us in every war we’ve ever fought?” It’s true that South Africa had been steadfast in its support, but not of us: many of its officials had ties to a party that supported the Nazis, and John Vorster, who led the country for thirteen years, had been jailed for cozying up to Hitler. Incredibly, Reagan claimed in a radio address that South Africa was a bastion of racial equality: “[T]hey have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country—the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertaining and so forth were segregated. That has all been eliminated.” This would have been welcome news to Nelson Mandela, had it reached his prison cell. Turning to a country he presumably knew more about because he despised it so much, Reagan said, “I’m no linguist but I have been told that in the Russian language there isn’t even a word for freedom.” Reagan was half right: he was no linguist. The Russian word for freedom is svoboda. Reagan might be best remembered for

Two months later, 241 U.S. military personnel stationed in Beirut as part of Reagan’s confused Lebanon policy died in the bombings of their marine barracks. He changed the subject. In what should have been called Operation Expedient Distraction, he ordered the invasion of the minuscule Caribbean island nation of Grenada, a mission roughly as challenging as the conquest of a Sandals resort. His approval rating soared.

Given the press’s reluctance to fact-check Reagan, it’s no surprise that the public gradually stopped caring whether anything

he said was, well, factual.

In 1964, while visiting a Scottsdale, Arizona, boarding school as its commencement speaker, he said to a student, “My name is Ronald Reagan. What’s yours?” The boy replied, “I’m your son, Mike.”)

He could state the obvious and somehow make it shocking, as when he visited Auschwitz and observed, “Boy, they were big on crematoriums, weren’t they?”

‘If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.’ We took them literally—that advice—as you know. But I didn’t need that because I have Barbara Bush.”

Quayle tried to pry loose from his tangled synapses the organization’s famous slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste”: “You take the United Negro College Fund model that what a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”

One TV anchor who interviewed Quayle at the convention had a reaction similar to that of his professor at DePauw: “When I looked into his eyes I could see to the back of his head.”

Reporters peppered him with questions about two issues that would dog him in the weeks ahead: his reputedly execrable academic record and his alleged use of family connections to avoid serving in Vietnam.XVII

“I did not know in 1969 that I would be in this room today, I’ll confess.” His performance at this presser was so shaky that it freaked out the usually unflappable Roger Ailes. “I thought, ‘Oh shit, we’d better get a hold of this thing,’ ” he later said.XVIII

Well, for starters: as a prelude to his career in politics, he’d failed his final exam in political science. And then there was the fishy way he got into law school. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Quayle, a fire-breathing congressional opponent of affirmative action, had taken advantage of a special admissions program designed to favor minority applicants. No one could figure out which minority group he belonged to, other than “blond newspaper heirs.” Concurrent with Quayle’s acceptance to the University of Indiana Law School, his press-baron grandpa made substantial donations to the very same institution of higher learning.XIX In September 1988, revelations about how Quayle oozed his way into law school so outraged some of Indiana University’s student leaders that they demanded he disclose the precise dollar amount of his family’s benevolence.

On the campaign trail, Stu Spencer worked overtime to keep Quayle from revealing his glaring cluelessness. That meant putting him in front of friendly audiences—“friendly” being a delicate way of saying “white.” “Dan Quayle doesn’t know about cities,” Spencer told the Los Angeles Times. “He doesn’t know who lives there, ghettos, traffic, race, crime, housing, all of that stuff, but we’ll teach him.”XX In deeming Quayle educable, Spencer seemed to believe he’d succeed where the DePauw faculty had failed. Despite his best efforts, Spencer couldn’t stop his pupil from asserting that Republicans “understand the importance of bondage between parent and child,” or that “[t]his election is about who’s going to be the next president of the United States.” 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.”

With so few tangible accomplishments to Quayle’s credit, Bush took a unique approach to boosting his VP pick: he started praising him for all the things he didn’t do. Addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Bush said that Quayle “did not go to Canada, he did not burn his draft card, and he damn sure didn’t burn the American flag.” Of course, fleeing to Canada and burning his draft card would have been bizarre behaviors for someone whose wealthy family got him out of Vietnam via the Indiana National Guard. Still, Bush showed admirable restraint by not bragging about other things that Quayle didn’t do, such

as assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand or explodin...

As we’ve discussed, reading is a pretty good indicator of intellectual curiosity, and, unfortunately, there’s scant evidence that Quayle read anything besides his golf score.

“I want him to step on his dick, and then we’ll own him again.” After the VP debate, however, during which the candidate would step on his dick roughly once a minute, Spencer would give up on owning Quayle and settle for disowning him.

Speaking in El Salvador, he let that nation’s government know that “[w]e expect them to work toward the elimination of human rights.” On a return visit, he posed with a Soviet anti-tank rocket, holding it backward so the muzzle pointed toward him. But these embarrassments can’t compete with the most memorable episode of his vice presidency: the incident that has made “Dan Quayle potato” the most popular Google search involving his name.

At one meeting on welfare and the state’s network of social services programs, Bush had trouble distinguishing between Medicaid, the federal government’s medical program for the poor, and Medicare. “Now, I hear these two. They’re different. What’s the difference between the two?” Bush asked, according to an aide.

Indeed, a later Bush-Rove campaign gem would have made Atwater proud: their use of push-polling in the 2000 South Carolina primary to spread the lie that Senator John McCain had fathered an illegitimate Black child. Like Yale and DKE, the Bush family tradition of appearing genteel while weaponizing bigotry was part of W.’s inheritance.

Louis Menand asked him to name some of his influences. Gore eagerly complied, name-checking Reinhold Niebuhr, Edmund Husserl, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the author of that juicy page-turner Phenomenology of Perception. After Bush read (or skimmed) the Gore profile, he was far from intimidated; he was stoked. Bush had no intention of competing with Gore on the field of knowledge; instead, he’d play to win on the field of ignorance. Bush broadcast his status as a bibliophile by declaring, “One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”

In the early weeks of his presidency, Bush’s performance on the international stage was no more encouraging. An official at the British Foreign Office recalled Dubya’s first phone conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair: “It basically consisted of Bush talking about various places in Scotland where he’d got [drunk] when he was young and asking Tony whether he knew them and Tony not really knowing what to say.”

On April 20, 2001, CIA analysts prepared a report for him titled “Bin Laden Planning Multiple Operations.”

Eventually, they resorted to a President’s Daily Brief with a screaming headline dominated by one-syllable words: “UBL [Usama Bin Laden] Threats Are Real.” After the CIA’s intelligence analyst Michael Morell delivered this PDB to Bush on Air Force One, W. dismissively responded, “OK, Michael. You’ve covered your ass.”

Palin decides to flaunt her knowledge of American history. In his review of the book, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Michael D. Schaffer inventoried its avalanche of factual errors. Palin refers to John Adams as a “leading participant” in the Constitutional Convention, in Philadelphia; this could have been true only if Zoom had existed in 1787, since Adams was 3,500 miles away, serving as Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James’s. In a similar vein, she defends her opposition to the separation of church and state by noting that Benjamin Franklin proposed opening each session of that same convention with a prayer; she omits the bothersome fact that his idea wasn’t adopted. At one point, though, she does follow historical precedent: she asserts that “patriotic Americans” aren’t being racist by attacking Obama’s policies because they are merely advocating “smaller federal government and a return to federalism—otherwise known as states’ rights.” Here she reproduces the white supremacist dog whistle that Ronald Reagan used in his 1980 speech near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The Philadelphia where Reagan appeared left a deeper impression on Palin than the Philadelphia where John Adams didn’t.

During the Q&A portion of a meeting of the Christian Home Educators of Kentucky—not exactly hostile ground for the likes of Paul—he was asked how old the Earth was. “I forgot to say I was only taking easy questions,” he said. “I’m gonna pass on the age of the Earth. I think I’m just gonna have to pass on that one.” Armed with this profound understanding of science, Paul would later

appoint himself Grand Inquisitor whenever Dr. Anthony Fauci, the world’s most esteemed virologist, testified before the Senate.

But Angle, it turned out, had some unusual notions of her own. Concurring with Ron Johnson about climate change, she said that she didn’t “buy into the whole… man-caused global warming, man-caused climate change mantra of the left. I believe that there’s not sound science to back that up.” She did, however, believe that there was sound science linking abortion to breast cancer. She didn’t believe that the Constitution guaranteed the separation of church and state, conveniently ignoring that the First Amendment does just that. She was, however, a big fan of another part of the document: she mused that, if

conservatives didn’t prevail in the midterms, their supporters might need to seek what she called “Second Amendment remedies.”XIII She supported eliminating the IRS and auditing the Fed, which put her at odds with Palin, who didn’t know what the Fed did. She claimed that Dearborn, Michigan, was being ruled by Sharia law. Finally, she supported the privatization of Social Security, praising similar efforts by Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. “Sometimes dictators have good ideas,” she noted. Nevada’s voters, apparently less pro-Pinochet than Angle, reelected the Democratic incumbent, Senator Harry Reid.

As the 2012 presidential election cycle neared, speculation abounded that Palin might, after four years of Barack Obama, offer the nation a Return to Abnormalcy. Perhaps to signal that she was a new-and-improved Sarah Palin, vastly better informed than the one Katie Couric had eviscerated, she used a 2011 visit to a Revolutionary War site in Boston to retell the story of Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride: “He warned the British that they weren’t going be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells, and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.” Millions of schoolchildren who had learned that Revere’s mission was to warn the colonists that the British were, in fact, coming, were saddened to learn that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had lied to them. Revere’s actual mission, per Palin, was to warn the British to keep their hands off the colonists’ guns, which made him an eighteenth-century antecedent of NRA activists like Charlton Heston. Another detail of Palin’s account—the part about Revere “ringing those bells”—was of unknown origin.

For his troubles, Buchanan was given a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention, which he used to declare a “cultural war.” (Molly Ivins famously said his speech “probably sounded better in the original German.”)

The flimflam succeeded, in part, because of Burnett’s genius, but also because Trump—like Ronald Reagan, professional wrestlers, and other charlatans and con men—made people want to be fooled.

“Bowling Green Massacre.”

“We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.” This lament drew confused reactions from people living in Sweden, where no such attack had occurred. On Twitter, the former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt asked, “Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound.” Some suggested that Trump had been confused by reports of a terror attack in the Pakistani city of Sehwan, which, in fairness, has four letters in common with Sweden. Maybe that was what he’d been smoking—or, as he would say, “smocking.”

Tubs thinks that the United States fought World War II “to free

Europe of socialism”; impressively, we managed to keep this agenda a secret from one of our key allies, the prominent socialist Joseph Stalin. He thinks the Constitution prohibits one party from controlling all three branches of government, which he defines as “the House, the Senate, and the executive.” When it comes to climate change, we can expect many lively scientific debates about its causes between Tuberville and his Republican colleague Ron Johnson, who, as you’ll recall, blamed it all on sunspots. “[T]here is one person that changes climate in this country and that is God,” Tubs declares. If there is one person besides God who’s capable of changing climate in this country, it might be Representative Louie Gohmert, of Texas. When a deputy chief of the Forest Service testified before Congress, Gohmert inquired, “[I]s there anything that the National Forest Service or [Bureau of Land Management] can do to change the course of the moon’s orbit or the Earth’s orbit around the sun? Obviously, that would have profound effects on our climate.” Obviously! Gohmert should be commended for his creative thinking, but, as any informed citizen can tell you, the only people who can change the orbits of the Earth and the moon are the Rothschilds.

In his riveting book, The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution, David Paul Kuhn re-creates the scene: “As the mass coalesced, men’s eyes were trained on City Hall. Shouting persisted: ‘Where’s Lindsay?… Lindsay’s a rat!… We want Lindsay! We want Lindsay!’ ” The deputy borough president, Leonard Cohen, “saw a ‘large mass of men,’ about five to six hundred, with yellow hard hats and American flags, pushing against the front of City Hall, ‘shouting slogans and chanting angrily.’ The men drove forward and reached the foot of the steps. Suddenly, they surged up the stairs ‘as if to storm City Hall itself’… Scores of hardhats hopped City Hall’s fence, leapt over the hoods of boxy police cars, and toppled iron barricades. Several hardhats ran with flags pointed forward, like soldiers brandishing their colors.” A rioter reached the roof of City Hall, where he restored the flag to full staff, to

the raucous cheers of his brethren below. By day’s end, dozens had been injured. Prior to these events, Trump’s future pen pal Richard M. Nixon had been in a fragile state of mind. Widely vilified for the bombing of Cambodia, he was, according to those close to him, “on the edge of a nervous breakdown.” The savagery of the Hardhat Riot seemed to cheer him up. “Last week, a group of construction workers came up Wall Street and beat the living hell out of some demonstrators who were desecrating the American flag,” his aide Pat Buchanan wrote to him. “Whether one condones this kind of violence or not, probably half the living rooms in America were in standing applause at the spectacle.” There was little doubt whether Nixon and Buchanan condoned this kind of violence; to show his appreciation for the attack, the president invited leaders of the rioters’ unions to the White House for a celebratory photo op. Nixon claimed that he was honoring “labor leaders and people from Middle America who still have character and guts and a bit of patriotism.” In return, the labor chieftains gave him an honorary hard hat. As Nixon later reminisced, the hardhats “were with us when some of the elitist crowd were running away from us. Thank God for the hardhats!”

Shortly after Joe Geller, the Democratic chairman of Miami-Dade County, arrived at the scene, he was assaulted. “This one guy was tripping me and pushing me and kicking me,” Geller told the Washington Post. “At one point, I thought if they knocked me over, I could have literally got stomped to death.” According to the New York Times, “Upstairs in the Clark center, several people were trampled, punched or kicked when protesters tried to rush the doors outside the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections. Sheriff’s deputies restored order. When the ruckus was over, the protesters had what they had wanted: a unanimous vote by the board to call off the hand counting.” The attack, which became known as the Brooks Brothers Riot, helped secure the presidency for Bush. Citing the halt in the recount, Geller said, “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.” The Republican rioters weren’t done, though. They proceeded to Broward County in the hopes of stopping the count there, too.