Play To The Dumb

It's no longer news, sadly, but it's still remarkable that we have in this country a major political party that is premised on presenting no ideas, and whose success depends on the stupidity of voters, which it overtly encourages, and to which it directly plays.

...the public continues to struggle in identifying political figures, foreign leaders and even knowing facts about key government policies. Only about a third of Americans (34%) know that the government’s bailout of banks and financial institutions was enacted under the Bush administration. Nearly half (47%) incorrectly say that the Troubled Asset Relief Program – widely known as TARP – was signed into law by President Obama.

I'd venture a guess that if it were broken down by political affiliation, we'd find way more than half of teabaggers believing Obama was the originator of TARP and the bank bailouts. We know for sure that they don't understand where by far most of the national debt, over which they're so outraged, comes from.

And so, relentlessly, Republican leaders and their RWS™ and Fox "news" keep playing to the dumb, reinforcing the misconceptions. In that way, they have to propose nothing on their own. They're getting confident enough in the gullibility of their voters that they're even admitting it. As policy: keep our mouths shut.

Can we really be that vacuous as a country? A mere two years after Republican fiscal policy was shown, undeniably, to be the voodoo economics that GHWB once called it; within a couple of years of the beginning of the bailouts; while the steam is still rising from the effluent of unregulated excess, people have no understanding of what happened, what was done to try to fix it, and why? None, seemingly. Can it really be that enough people have forgotten -- or never knew -- so much so quickly that they're ready to return to the same policies that got it all started?

You know, it's one thing to criticize the dearth of job creation, or to have reservations about specifics of health care reform, or about the Wall Street regulations, or whatever. But to think that people simply don't know or understand what happened, and that they're so easily subject to mongering of fear and being fed disinformation that they're willing to put back in power the same people who brought the destruction, who not only have no new ideas but who want to go back to doing the same damn things.... it's just unimaginable. And yet, there it is.

At some point -- or so you'd think -- people would wake up to the fact that they're being played, that their putative leaders consider them stupid, feed them b.s. on the assumption that they'll never figure it out. Or care. But for that to happen, they'd have to be.... not stupid. And Democrats would, finally, have to figure out how to teach.