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Originally Posted by anhailla
Besides some good people on these boards...in general, Americans are stupid.
I just was in an argument where 3 women said the issue that was most important is that a President didn't cheat on his wife.
"it shows character"...uh huh
what can you say to the ignorant elite?
nothing, they don't care and they don't care to. "I have been cheated on" one lady said.
uh huh...
so to answer your question ppat...being "bitched slapped" doesn't effect the ignorant.
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You may be right, however good and stupid aren't mutually exclusive. We're all just good simple people looking for safe harbor in a storm. How on earth did we know the hotel we pulled up at was run by Norman Bates? Nevertheless we pay the price of our stupidity as do the not-so-stupid right along with us.
We are fated to benefit from only the most recent history and now, with Fox, we will listen to others twisting that to their advantage even before the history books hit the press.
It's the human condition to cast our lot on a person or ideology rather than to analyze or learn anything outside of what puts food on the table, buy a better car, or take a buttery vacation. Inevitably this comes back to haunt us. We won't hold those at the helm accountable day to day but we'll join the lynch mob after the shit hits the fan.
The lessons of the Great Depression? "Bah, those rules don't apply anymore" they said...and we listened. But there were warning signs that we should have been responsible for heeding just as much as the one that says "Freeway ends ahead".
We should have known way back when we caught glimpses of the eery, unreal mind-set at play inside the Bush adminstration,
best identified and held up to the light years ago by Ron Suskind:
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Originally Posted by Ron Suskind
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "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."
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Our demise tracked proportionally with the price of oil. Just consider the price now vs. the price when Bush took office. I'm no ardent fan but Bill Clinton in his autobiography claimed that he was preparing the US for the time in which we were not the worlds only superpower. Then along comes somone who claims "we" are an empire after which every twit among us took great pride in that identification.
So we listen to whoever will make us feel good in the moment and as we climb out of this hole we'll listen to whoever offers hope. Hopefully, this time the vehicles of our demise will loom so large that we will actually address them, until we forget again.
My biggest concern is that when there is economic and social despair this does not always make us smarter...at least it hasn't in history. It has often led to fascism...that "wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross thing".
So who will we listen to next now that we will likely stop listening to a few who've had our ears? Who will fill this void. I vote for intelligence over charisma which got us here in the first place.
That's really the problem isn't it? How do we get lucky enough to elect someone more intelligent than ourselves? How would we even recognize such a person?