Conscientious Stupidity

'Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.' Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

As I've mentioned ad nauseum on this blog, I despise stupidity. Whether it's the willful ignorance of the creation science peeps, the sheeple who swallow political lies in the face of overwhelming logical evidence debunking it or the peeps who brag about being uninformed, as a TK stupidity irks me to no end.

And this political season has been chock full of it.

One of the things I've been most concerned about over the last twenty years has been this anti-intellectual strain as the conservative movement rose to power.

It concerns me because the republic our Founding Fathers set up thrives when reasoned debate takes place and we rationally and thoughtfully discuss issues of importance to Americans.

But with poisonous partisanship injected into the public discourse, it has so contaminated the body politic that we have political gridlock as a result. Political discourse resembles a WWE wrestling match or playing the dozens back in the hood. And one of the things that really irks me is the lack of intelligence in some of our political leaders.

When I'm pondering who I'm going to cast a ballot for, I'm not looking at how well a person speaks (although that's a major plus after the last 8 years of an inarticulate dumbass in the White House) how cute they look in their $150,000 wardrobe, whether they can fly a jet or not or I can have a beer with them. The quality that's most important to me is do you have the intelligence to handle the complex job of being in that position?

But unfortunately we have so many people fixated on superficial crap that they overlook the fact that when it comes to being the president, intelligence counts.