Political theory

I know, I know—saying that politicians are morons is both redundant and obvious. And adding the modifier “Republican from a former Confederate state” is an even further waste of breath.

Especially since “I am an ignorant buffoon” is pretty much the one message that they seem capable of staying on.

By way of example I give you just a few who have risen from the slime of butt-ignorance to make pronouncements recently.

There’s Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia, who’s evidently a physician and who sits on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee with Missouri Republican Todd Akin. Haven’t heard whether Broun is able to swallow legitimate and illegitimate categories of rape, but he does have his own whackjob beliefs on science. To wit: evolution and embryology are “lies straight from the pit of hell.”

Broun was videotaped at a banquet of presumptive supporters at a Baptist church making these statements. (Republicans don’t seem to have twigged to this whole technology burst that pretty much guarantees that anything you do or say is likely to end up on the Internet, do they?)

Now, I find a few things interesting about this. One: he makes declarations like that and then calls himself a scientist; what’s up with that? I’m wondering if his medications need adjustment? And—speaking of things medical—who would seek treatment from a doctor with such a tenuous grasp on scientific thinking for the past, oh, 70 years?  

But, wait—as they say all over the cable spectrum, there’s more.

Not too far away from Georgia we have Arkansas, and a state representative who has written a book asserting that slavery was a “blessing in disguise”, and a state candidate who has written a book advocating the deportation of Muslims. All of them. Not sure where, but just outta here.

I swear I am not making this stuff up.

(Frankly, I have to question whether anyone who’d publicly take such patently idiotic positions has ever read a book, much less possesses the ability to, you know, write one; but I know that even in Arkansas you can hire someone to run the word processor. Or kill the poultry to make the quill pens, if you want to revert back to methods that were in vogue at the same time as ideas that went out of general favor 150 years ago.)

While I find all of these positions worrisome, what’s even more troubling to me is that there are plenty of people out there who will go to the polls (not looking like Latinos and therefore de facto not in danger of being removed from the electoral rolls) next month and vote for them.