CSotD: ‘Dare to be stupid’ was a joke, folks

When I gave the advice “Dare to be stupid!” what I meant was that silly jokes are fun. I wasn’t advising deliberate stupidity in the political realm, which is disloyal.

There is spin, and Adam Zyglis mocks the spin of those who don’t mind running up a deficit for a wall, but who can’t see how we can afford the same level of health care most First World nations furnish their citizens or to deal with serious environmental issues.

The wall is neither necessary nor effective and there certainly is a climate change crisis and a need for a better health care system.

But “We can afford what I want but not what you want” is more spin than lying, and the sort of disagreement to be settled in honest debates and fair elections.

And we can dream of such things.

After all, as Bill Bramhall notes, we went through a period of extremists screaming “Commies!” and yet somehow managed to pass FDR’s New Deal and also get Medicare in as part of LBJ’s “Great Society.”

Not that there aren’t libertarians currently trying to tear those down or steal their funding for other projects, but I haven’t heard anyone rail against them as “Communism.”

But we’re stupider than we used to be, and now feeding the hungry and healing the sick are seen as the same as confiscating all the stores and factories and having a central committee to set production goals.

That’s not “spin.” That’s “stupid.”

I don’t know if people who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it, but people who don’t know the difference between socialism and communism should be condemned to repeat the eighth grade.

 

Amid all the hysterical “Commie! Commie!” cartoons about Bernie, Mike Smith makes what I think is the salient point:

Bernie came on the scene in 2016 when nobody else was willing to challenge the DNC’s Anointed One and he proposed things that nobody else was willing to propose.

But, as Smith points out, Sanders is no longer the only candidate, nor is he the only person proposing those things, nor is he the newest and freshest.

Here’s a good opinion piece comparing Sanders to Gene McCarthy, my only quibble being that, once Bobby entered the race, McCarthy’s support began to fall off. It picked up a bit when Bobby was killed, but he was always more of a conscience than a true alternative.

Bernie could have won. But he didn’t get the nomination and we don’t have to re-fight that mess because there are other choices now and the things he said are only dismissed as “unicorns” by those who don’t want to see them happen.

 

Arctic Circle makes a point here about energy consumption, but it might as well be about honest campaigning, because, yes, the trolls are back and already leading the discussion on social media.

As much as Facebook and Twitter and the rest promise to expel the bots and phony accounts and fight against deliberate misinformation, it’s hard to tell if they’re not really trying or genuinely incapable of it.

Nor does it much matter, and I wish we could solve the problem by turning off the Internet and then turning it on again, but, as the little penguin suggests, the effectiveness of that might require leaving it off until 2021.

There’s probably a potential fantasy story, something like “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant,” (or “Damn Yankees”) about the Internet going down for two years, at the end of which we’d all be much more productive and friendly and socially well-adjusted.

But there ain’t no Joe Hardy in the dugout and we’re going to have to deal with the trolls and the gullible people who believe them and who recycle their lies and give them strength.

It has become part of the world in which we live, and the votes of suckers and fools and stupid people count the same as the votes of anyone else. You can unfriend them to keep your sanity, but you’ll run into them at the polls in November.

Where they will dare to be stupid, and, unfortunately, all plans to keep stupid people from voting have turned out to be more evil than honest.

 

Which is related to the fact that, Trump and Co. having mounted an attempt to root out voter fraud that never existed, it turns out that, as Kevin Siers notes, there has indeed been election fraud.

Only it wasn’t them damn libtards what done it, so it doesn’t count.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Ed Hall)

 

(Pat Bagley)

So the Democratic National Committee has backed away from pre-selecting a candidate for us this time around, and it turns out there are several — make that “many” — people who would like the job.

Which makes for an interesting juxtaposition, because Ed Hall suggests that the result will be too many ideas and too much input and a confused outcome.

While Pat Bagley worries that voters are too picky and too willing to overthrow a good candidate because of some minor, pea-at-the-bottom-of-the-pile bit of ephemera.

My response to Ed is that I can remember when the Platform Committee debated each plank and came up with a coherent statement of what the party stood for and then selected a candidate who could stand on that platform.

That was back when people chose delegates they trusted to represent them at the convention.

Binding primaries have changed the game a bit, so that, for instance, when the Republicans nominated Trump, they had to take out a plank in their platform that might annoy Vladimir Putin.

But I’m willing to bet the crop of Democratic candidates could, certainly by the time the debates and early primaries shake them down to two or three, produce a coherent platform. They simply aren’t that disparate in appeal.

As for Bagley’s take on it, I’ve always thought that Hans Christian Andersen story should have ended with the complaining princess being thrown out and the prince thanking his wise mother.

 

Lord save us from the perennially discontent.