I don’t expect the average American to know the names of all nine Supreme Court members, or even to know that there are nine Justices. But I do expect a presidential candidate to know the answers to those questions. Rick Perry doesn’t. I’m trying to think of an equivalent from everyday life. It’s like being a college basketball player and not knowing who Kobe Bryant is. Rick Perry is a politician. That’s what he does for a living and has done for a living for decades. He ought to know who is on the Supreme Court just by osmosis. Pretty much any political junkie can tell you who is on the Supreme Court. You have to be willfully ignorant to be in politics and not know. And, the thing is, this kind of stupidity is incredibly rare on the Democratic side, but it seems to be almost normal among Republicans, who keep giving us candidates like Quayle and Palin and Perry. Why is that?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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The really sad thing is that my first thought upon reading this was that it’s kind of libelous to group Quayle in with Palin and Perry.
Ye gods, man, that collection should come with a warning label; by the end of it my IQ had dropped 20 points at least.
Want more?
Collect them all.
I feel like you posted this with the intention of it being a rebuttal, but I think it cements my case.
Your case being that Dan Quayle is a lot smarter than Rick Perry and Sarah Palin?
Indeed.
it’s not just the fact that he couldn’t remember. okay, one brain fart is fine, but this one coupled with the 3 agencies question from debate and the fact rather than just saying I’m sorry I can’t remember the last name, is say “Montomayer” or whatever…really???
And then they make jokes about Obama needing a teleprompter, and speculate about his grades.
Alito, Scalia, Thomas, Bader-Ginsberg, Sotomayor, Roberts, kennedy, breyer, kagan.
I’m smarter than Rick Perry.
of course, so is my cat, so the bar’s set kinda low.
Call me a hopeless optimist, but I think the average American who graduated from high school does know how many SC members there are, if not all their names. Which puts Perry well below-average, like all or most of his fellow GOP hopefuls.
To answer the question, they keep giving us candidates like Quayle and Palin and Perry and Cain (and let’s not pretend Bushes and Reagan don’t belong in that same group) because their prime weapon is fanning resentment against smart “elitists”. So you can have a rich person like Romney because he keeps making a fool of himself, and you can have an alleged smart person like Gingrich because he behaves like a 10-year-old, but you can’t have someone who speaks rationally and draws on the Western intellectual tradition. Or more to the point, intellectual bad, crafty good.
No.
The reason that the Ratpublicans keep giving us stupid candidates is because the people who vote Ratpublican are stupid.
Duh.
Why are they stupid?
1-Genetics.
a-Survival of the fittest is so over.
2-Education. Our educational system has gone down the drain. Top to bottom.
3-Media. It’s not enough that we have massive numbers of the undereducated (and thus to some degree undersocialized) progeny of people who wouldn’t have made it through a hard winter in the U.S. even 60 years ago who are in a position to vote…they consume media that dumb them down even more.
“Duh” squared!!!
And the Ratpubs keep rolling along.
Bet on it.
Solution(s)?
I have none.
If Life is done with us, then we will go down.
Otherwise? We’ll just keep muddling along.
So it goes.
We’ve just got to deal with it as well as we can.
AG
P.S. Just to disarm the dog-whistlers in the audience before they pounce…none of what I am saying above is at all racist. The boondonkeys in Maine…white boondonkeys, and having some Maine roots myself I know ’em well…fit my “progeny” description perfectly, and truth be told, the minority people in America whose ancestors have survived much worse than just “hard winters” here for any number of generations? By and large they come from better, stronger-in- every-way genetic pools than does the average white American. Bet on that as well. They had to overcome much more just to survive.
If you have evidence that “our educational system has gone down the drain”, by all means, please provide it.
Because it’s my understanding that by pretty much every available measurement, today’s young people are better educated than their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc.
Evidence?
1-The people who compile “available measurements” such as those in which you so naively believe are involved in the same sham educational system that they are supposedly rating. They are complicit in the sham. So complicit that most of them actually believe the tripe that they are promoting.
2-I see it on all levels of the system to which i am exposed.
a-I saw it in a middle class/upper middle class suburb outside of NYC where I moved in the late ’80s…still as naive as are you presently…in the expectation that my son would be entering a good school system. It was not. Not on any level. Among his experiences, he had a math teacher who could not consistently add correctly, a Spanish teacher who could barely speak Spanish, any number of teacher who could not accurately grade a test, a music teacher who could not tune his own instrument and worst of all, an entire administration that had no idea whatsoever of how to go about dealing with children’s and young adult’s needs and problems. Learning difficulties…most of which were brought about by overexposure to mediocre media, dull homes and incompetent teachers…were referred to psychologists/pill dispensers and personal problems were swept under the rug in the interests of…n the interests of a mediocre kind of overall false calm. I got him out of there before…just before, it appeared to me…he was permanently injured by the experience, and into a so-called “experimental” school which in reality was just doing a good job of general teaching (on many levels), and he is now embarked on a doctoral program at one of the finest universities in the United States. Had I not done so, he’d be in big trouble now. Bet on it. Being able to answer multiple choice questions correctly is not “education”, it’s just rote learning. Have you seen the SAT cheating”scandal” going on now in Long Island, NY? It’s nationwide. Bet on it.
b-The school system from which we fled to the suburbs was the NYC public school system. My son was attending one of the (supposedly) best grammar schools in Manhattan. His teacher in 1st grade was not even capable of maintaining peace in the classroom, let alone teaching children. I used to have to go in several times a week…I work nights, mostly…and literally break up fights in the back of the room while she mumbled on. The next year he got a wonderful young teacher, a Yale graduate. At the end of the year her job was taken away by another bitter, confused old fool who had union seniority. We left. It was hopeless.
c-I myself do a great deal of teaching on all levels from grammar school age right on through graduate school. Never on a day-to-day basis, I am brought in as a sort of “consultant” or expert in my field, which is music. It’s gotten to the point that all I have to do is walk in and get a feel for the school and its students and I know exactly what is going on. Most public schools…urban, suburban and country…are dominated by people who failed to get their shit together enough to actually be able to do something else well enough to make a decent living. Sorry, but there it is. There are truly dedicated teachers, of course…I meet more of them in grammar schools than I do anywhere else…but they are both in the minority and in a decided minority in terms of administrative positions. The administrators are usually vapid hustlers…low level politicians copying the wiles and tactics of our equally vapid politicians in higher office…out only for a larger slice of the money pie. So-called “higher” education? Have you been following the various child abuse cases in the college sports world? They are the tip of an iceberg the size of Anarctica in terms of not only sexual abuse but more importantly overall, administrative abuse. How do you think that these predators managed to survive in their respective systems for decades? No one in power gives a shit, that’s how. State colleges? Please. Community colleges and the like? Not as good as the middle class high school I attended in the ’60s on Long Island. You have to get up into the elite colleges and universities to find any real “education” going on, and how many people are lucky enough to be able to afford such things or gifted enough to be able to get a scholarship? Not very damned many, for sure.
Take your statistics and shove ’em where the sun don’t shine. Like in the statistic makers’
orfices…errrr, sorry. Offices. Except for the very few, our educational system is failing miserably.AG
Uh, you’d be wrong:
Most Americans Can’t Name Any Supreme Court Justices, Says FindLaw.com Survey
I don’t expect the average American to know the names of all nine Supreme Court members, or even to know that there are nine Justices. But I do expect a presidential candidate to know the answers to those questions.
THIS
THIS
THIS
this is why the Minstrel Cain was obviously a joke – mofo couldn’t answer the question of ‘ right of return’ with Palestine/Israel.
Joe Blow in Peoria – I could care less if he knew
but, if you step up to the plate saying you want to run for President…then you SHOULD know certain things.
.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Betcha, Perry can’t even name the last judge he appointed to the Texas Supreme Court. Perry can’t even tell anyone the last time he visited the border with Mexico or the Mexican presidents name.
Ah yes and I remember Palin’s response to being asked if there were any recent Supreme Court decisions with which she disagreed. She did the infamous Palin pause and then said, ‘oh no not really’. I thought at the time that she may not even know that the Supreme Court was a branch of govt.
Politics, for 80% of the American people, has nothing to do with policy. It is a form of self-expression, in which you signal to your friends, and to the world, how you look at the world, and how you feel about yourself, via your choices between
consumer goodsparties and candidates on offer.“Willfully ignorant” is a very popular brand.
More like willessly ignorant.
For real.
These people do not “choose” to be ignorant. They are born that way, raised and acculturized that way, are not taught how not to be that way and in many cases are now totally incapable of learning.
Can this be changed?
Hitler-like ovens?
Mao Zhe Dong-style “relearning” projects? A Cultural Revolution for the 21st century?
I think not.
So we’re stuck with ’em.
AG
I’m breaking my ass… but then I’m just a
public school teacheroverpaid, unaccountable, pension-chasing civil service drone.For today’s GOP base, the #1 qualification for office is contempt for liberals, liberal knowledge and liberal policies. This is the center of their belief system. It seems it is not enough to call liberals and their policies wrong; it is necessary to view them as completely illegitimate. #1A is “lower my taxes”, which shows how extraordinarily important #1 is as a qualification.
Given that facts have a liberal bias, this requires GOP candidates, and their supporters in Pundittown and elsewhere, to misreport facts, old and new. For God’s sake, these are people whose “think” tanks have elevated the contemptible Amity Schlaes as an economic historian!
Thus, the most common types of conservative candidates are:
If you believe the bullshit spun by the modern conservative movement and know nothing else, you are in the second category. But, then, we all know this, which makes Boo’s question rheorical, right?
We have the opposite of a meritocracy in this country; therefore, many people in these categories are wealthy. Since the modern GOP models for winning elections are well-financed misinformation and voter suppression campaigns, being wealthy is a common trait of these two GOP candidate types, which helps “catapult the propaganda”.
Perry’s problem isn’t that he flubbed the name of a Supreme Court Justice. I think most people consider that equivalent to losing in “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?” Funny, but not really important.
Perry’s real problem is that he flubs these points after he brings them up. This isn’t George Bush being asked to name the ruler of Pakistan. Perry is stupider than that.
So what’sername is inarguably an activist judge? Nobody asked him the question, he make it a critical point himself. Then he compounded his error by talking about “eight unelected and frankly unaccountable judges”
Perry also has an established pattern of flubs.