He Sees Stupid People...and they'll probably vote for Bush

Via Bush Wars, Seattle Post Intelligencer (no pun intended) presents Neal Starkman's point of view:

It's the "Stupid factor," the S factor: Some people -- sometimes through no fault of their own -- are just not very bright.

It's not merely that some people are insufficiently intelligent to grasp the nuances of foreign policy, of constitutional law, of macroeconomics or of the variegated interplay of humans and the environment. These aren't the people I'm referring to. The people I'm referring to cannot understand the phenomenon of cause and effect. They're perplexed by issues comprising more than two sides. They don't have the wherewithal to expand the sources of their information. And above all -- far above all -- they don't think.

You know these people; they're all around you (they're not you, else you would not be reading this article this far). They're the ones who keep the puerile shows on TV, who appear as regular recipients of the Darwin Awards, who raise our insurance rates by doing dumb things, who generally make life much more miserable for all of us than it ought to be. Sad to say, they comprise a substantial minority -- perhaps even a majority -- of the populace.

And therein lies one of the biggest problems facing us. Stupid people are the ones who believe Bush--or, for that matter BushClone Joe Lieberman, who post-debate last Sunday said (thanks to Juan Cole for the quote):
"I don't know how anybody could say that we're not safer with a homicidal maniac, a brutal dictator, an enemy of the United States, a supporter of terrorism, a murderer of hundreds of thousands of his own people ... in prison instead of in power."

As Cole ably points out, that is "pure demogoguery." Stupid people eat that shit up, then grin and ask for another plateful. Stupid people cannot distinguish between North Africans (who, like many of us here in the US, are a mix of ethnicities), Arabs, Jews, Turks, Kurds, Iranians, Uzbeks, Tadjiks, Khazaks, Azeris, Armenians, Pashtuns--hell, there are more than I can list offhand. Stupid people then don't get the fact that, within broad ethnic divisions, you've got divisions of nationality (i.e., Iraqis are multi-ethnic), divisions of religion (some Arabs are Christian, you morons), divisions of region, family, and so on. Stupid people simply look to the Middle East, see people who may or may not have different skin tone, hair color, or physical features, people who speak a different language, people who may or may not worship the same god/worship the same god in the same way--and decide that they're all terrorists--or at least all the ones that Bush tells us are terrorists. Stupid people have not got even the basics down. For instance, even though we're fighting a damn war in Iraq, who can actually point Iraq out on a map? Same with Afghanistan--I'll bet for either country, the number of people who can point out their relative locations on a map are less than 50 percent. Even fewer could tell you the time difference, and whether Iraq/Afghanistan time is ahead or behind US time (hint: the answer to whether it's ahead or behind will be the same regardless of which time zone in the US you're in).

Stupid people won't have the first clue as to recent history in either Iraq or the Middle East in general. They might vaguely recall a war about ten years ago (i.e., Gulf War I), but ask them about the Ottoman Empire and they'll think you're talking about a furniture store (if they even know THAT). And yet, many of these same stupid people are Christians, at least nominally--how can you profess faith in a religion that you don't have the first clue about?

Which will be my final point in thie paticular--uh--impassioned opinion piece (sounds nicer than "rant," doesn't it): you'd think that a society that at least has a passing interest in Christianity, if not an actual zealot fervor towards the movement, would spend some time learning a little about the region of it's origin. Yet, the most clueless in regards to the Middle East are often the MOST religious, thus proving that you can lead a stupid person to water, indeed, you can dunk that person in the water, but you can get the person to think...