Politics in America: Profiles in poppycock

Some years ago, as a columnist for the Tampa Tribune, I was invited by WFLA, Ch. 8 to provide analysis on election night. My commentary involved offending thousands of viewers, so I thought it went well.

There were several ridiculous constitutional amendments on the ballot that year, including a particularly inane one protecting pregnant pigs. They were all passing with flying (pig?) colors. This is Florida after all, where sanity goes to die.

At one point WFLA reporter Lance Williams, a lovely man, asked why I thought all these dubious amendments were passing. “Well, Lance I think they are all passing because voters are stupid.”

Within moments the station’s switchboard lit up with furious viewers greatly aggrieved that I suggested they were morons. I’ll stick with truth as a defense.

As you can imagine that pretty much ended my stint as a television pundit. But that certainly hasn’t ended the growing cancer of cuckoo spreading through the body politic.

There has been no small amount of chin-rubbing over the Jan. 6 insurrection that threatened the very foundations of our democracy, injured at least 140 law enforcement officers and could have easily ended with the murders of former Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

There are all manner of psychological and sociological explanations about the mentality of mob violence. All very reasonable.

But can we simply cut to the chase? The assault on the Capitol and all that has followed since can just as easily be viewed through the lens that we have entered the age of the politics of stupid — really, really stupid.

We pause here for a moment to note that nearly 100 of the people who have been charged in the Jan. 6 sedition are — everybody now — from Florida. How proud boys must we all be.

We’ve been going down the golden Trump Tower escalator of stupid for a while, fueled by a grifting, treasonous, former game show host aided and abetted by a conspiracy of dunces more than happy to advance any “alternative reality” the great pumpkin of Mar-a-Lago makes up.

Or consider this small but telling point: Millions of Americans have thrown their lot in with a former president who did not quite know what happened at Pearl Harbor.

Indeed, we have a governor in the state of Florida who has to be dragged like a petulant 4-year-old to say that Nazis are, you know, bad. There’s some presidential timber for you.

To be sure, you can be as willfully stupid as you want. This is (for now, at least) a free country. But the prospects for free and democratic society grow dimmer, the more its populace grows, ahem, dimmer.

We are quickly approaching a critical mass of civic illiteracy that does not bode well for us. And that is threat to our national security when the job of village idiot starts showing up on the ballot.

Let’s just take two recent events.

After Paul Pelosi, the husband of Nancy Pelosi, was savagely attacked by a QAnon-loving oaf, it took almost no time before conspiracy theories began flooding the dope-o-sphere suggesting the attacker was a male prostitute who was caught in his underwear. And who helped keep that ball rolling? None other than Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk, who re-tweeted the unfounded smear.

Soon Republicans like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, talk radio jockeys such as Glenn Beck and MAGA acolytes Sebastian Gorka, Megyn Kelly, Michael Savage, Roger Stone and Tucker Carlson all jumped on the balderdash bandwagon led by Donald Trump himself spreading disinformation about the Pelosi assault.

Where were the prominent Republicans in leadership roles who issued a condemnation of the disinformation campaign? They were hard to find.

So it is hardly surprising then that we’ve seen an almost unprecedented rise in antisemitism that has led to increasing attacks and vandalism toward the Jewish community also fostered across the internet with precious little pushback from our so-called political leadership.

People cluck and purse their lips when Kanye West (now known as Ye) and NBA player Kyrie Irving, who probably think the Wannsee Conference was a rock concert, propagate Holocaust denial theories and other antisemitic tropes.

The problem is these two boobs are not alone in their cattle car of conspiracy theories. At least 60% of registered Republicans believe — without a shred of evidence — that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.

What might we call this time we’re in? A Profile in Poppycock?