Tea Party Federalism: A New Meld of Whacky Ideas

Only property owners should be able to vote.

If that sounds like something out of the 18^th century you would not be wrong in thinking so. This is actually a point of view that was once quite prominent in American politics and policy making.

John Adams, our 2^nd President, thought it was a grand idea:

“John Adams, signer of the Declaration of Independence and later president, wrote in 1776 that no good could come from enfranchising more Americans:”

“Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end to it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level.”

But now we are hearing from the Teabaggers that this is pretty much what they think also:

“Judson Phillips, President of the Tea Party Nation recently stated he believes that only property-owning individuals should have voting rights.”

“Phillips made the case that the original intent of the founding fathers was to only grant voting rights to property owners. His reason: “If you’re a property owner, you actually have a vested stake in the community.”

Now here’s the rub and the irony. Adams, who Phillips apparently agrees with, was a Federalist. When he was President he sat as the leader of the Federalist Party. The Federalist Party, it might be recalled, was the party of a strong central government.

Federalism was anathema to those of purported to support “states rights,” a well-known plank of the Tea Party platform.

And if that doesn’t underline the wackiness of the Tea Party movement, nothing does. Teabaggers simply have no knowledge of politics, government or policy. The only thing that they seem to take seriously is anything that any Founding Father said or thought.

Anything. Even if it runs counter to the central core of their philosophy.

But then that may yet be another definition of insanity.

Or at best, blind ignorance.

One in Five Americans . . .

Why does it surprise anyone that one in five Americans believe that President Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim? Polls after all, are supposed to sample opinion across America in a way that avoids concentration on any one age group, any one region, and any one level of intellect.

You wouldn’t, for instance, conduct a poll in only Southern states to gauge an opinion that was supposed to reflect a national trend.

You wouldn’t direct your phone calls exclusively to college towns.

You need to get a cross section.

And guess what, 1 in 5 Americans are dumber than a bag of hammers.

One in five Americans believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. The very same proportion of Americans also believe these things:

They believe that the Sun revolves around Earth. Sadly, Nicholas Copernicus pretty much debunked that about 467 years ago, but I guess it takes more time for news to spread.

They believe that humans have been contacted by visitors from other planets. I saw that movie, too.

They believe that torture is a legitimate method to gain intelligence from terrorists and other Muslims.

They believe that individual states have a right to secede from the Union. Our governor is among these, unfortunately. They believe this despite the fact that the South actually lost that argument 145 years ago. Again, news travels slowly sometimes.

But what you say you know, or say you don’t know isn’t all of it, is it? What you say, a friend tells me, is not as revealing as what they actually do. So this amazing proportion also do, or don’t do the following:

20% of Americans have admitted that they pee in swimming pools. Comforting thought, huh?

As discussed by Miss Teen South Carolina, 20% of Americans can’t find America on a map.

So really, in broad terms over the length and breadth of America every 5th person you meet does not have the knowledge or the skill set to do something that many of us feel is a citizen’s most sacred duty, and that is to vote in elections. And the hope is that because of their ignorance and lack of ability, they don’t do that. It was Thomas Jefferson, after all, that said this:

“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”

Truer words were never spoken. But from what I read in this Boston Globe article, it is the hopelessly ignorant among us who have the strongest political convictions.

“On its own, this might not be a problem: People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)”

Conclusion? When faced with interaction with conservative ignorance the last thing you want to do is shower someone in the truth. For heaven’s sake don’t introduce facts. Best just to talk about the weather.

But leave out the part about global chimate change.

What the Voters Don’t Know Works For Rick Perry

Rick Perry is running a campaign based on ignorance.

As an educator, this runs counter to the very core of my being, but it doesn’t surprise me that the governor of the state that ranks second to last in America’s public school dropout rate, values ignorance over knowledge.

In denying Texans the opportunity to see Rick Perry in a televised debate with Democratic challenger Bill White, Perry, or more precisely, Perry’s handlers are bargaining that it is more beneficial to Perry’s image if Texans remain in ignorance how the two men stack up in a head-to-head debate. White is the better speaker of the two, and comes off very well when speaking extemporaneously. Perry lacks White’s ability to put complex thoughts together in a way that an 8th grader can understand what he means.

In other words, Rick Perry would have no trouble understanding what Bill White was saying, but would have great difficulty not looking like a complete fool responding to him.

So he stays away from debate. It worked for him in the primary against Kay Bailey Hutchison. Perry ran on ignorance and brass and handily defeated Hutchison. He expects to do the same against White.

But now we hear that Rick Perry will not even sit down with editorial review boards of the major newspapers and media outlets for a vetting. For an endorsement. This is slightly riskier because when a newspaper is not given a choice between candidates it has spoken to, it might just opt for the person who was willing to talk to them.

So one would think.

Trouble is, that’s not true either. Perry pulled the same stunt in refusing to be vetted by news media during the primary, but garnered the endorsements of those same media outlets anyway.

So for Rick Perry, Ignorance is Strength. The less people know about him the more likely it is that they will vote for him.

It is as if Perry’s campaign team have adopted the first sentence of the Doctor’s Oath: “First do no harm.” It’s just ironic that in this case harm is done by the spread of knowledge, and good is done by the preservation of ignorance.

Cleaning Up the “Ol Spell”: Yahoos and Hay

A friend alerted me to a video that is spreading over the internet like, well, like the oil currently spreading far and wide in the Gulf of Mexico right now.

I am amazed, literally amazed at the ignorance that people have about all things petroleum.

Watch the video. You will see two guys with very heavy Texas accents demonstrate how they pick up used motor oil that has been poured into basins of water by spreading hay over the spill, and then stirring (they say the wind does this).

Here it is from YouTube but you can find it everywhere right now.



Amazing, huh?

Now there are several things that I find just absolutely hilarious about this video. One is that these guys think they have come up with an unique idea. Using hay to pick up an oil spill.

Honestly.

Another belly laugh can be gotten when you listen to them figure out how to dispose of the mountains and mountains of hay that they will have once the millions of gallons of oil are picked up: Burn it.

If you want an opinion of how bad it is when you burn crude oil, ask any odd Kuwaiti whose air quality was degraded when their oil wells were set afire by retreating Iraqis. It’s toxic.

Ohm you say, we would use scrubbers to clean the emissions. But I would guess that not a single scrubber in existence would survive that job.

Then there’s the problem of all the oil that doesn’t come to the surface. Yes, not all oil comes to the surface. Ocean water is stratified and there are density boundaries. Oil that rises to a density boundary takes its time crossing it. How do we get the hay down to those lakes of oil below the surface, one of which is estimated to be 10 miles long, 3 miles wide, and 300 feet thick.

And finally I have to ask which 5 states do we have to mow from border to border in order to come up with enough hay to broadcast over this spill.

And that’s just the video. If you read the comments that accompany the YouTube posting, or any of them anywhere else on the internet, you get another taste of the ignorance that is practically epidemic among the right wing.

People think that Obama won’t do it because he’s too stupid. People think that the government won’t do it because it is such a good idea and so very cheap.

People who still think that it is the role of government to clean up a problem that was created by private industry. To which I have to say this: why is government automatically responsible for a mistake made by private industry? All we have heard in the past year are the squeals and squawks of the right wing over government bailouts of banks and the auto industry. Big government, now, needs to bail out BP and Halliburton? Is that it?

(shaking head in wonderment).