In the Trump Era, intelligence is a very unfortunate thing to have, because it gets insulted every five minutes.
About The Author
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.
Such strange times these are, when the leader of the most powerful country in the world is a complete dufus. It’s all so obvious to anyone and everyone who pays attention in the slightest. But he can’t see it and neither can around 40% of the population.
In this recent age, it started with W and worked its way down to Palin, and now we’ve moved even further down to Trump.
Once W was presented as “credible” and the alleged “decider,” and then Palin was presented as “knowledgeable” and “capable,” Trump is the logical outcome. I shudder to what else the R-Team can scrape out of far beyond the bottom of the barrel next time.
That, plus the ongoing propaganda to dismiss education, smarts, science,intellectual curiousity combined with the dumbing down of our school system (which includes dissing teachers and professors at every possible opportunity), and here we are…. just where the 1% wants us.
Stupid, incurious, impervious to fact that don’t accord with what we’ve been brainwashed to believe is our “world view,” dismissive of education and science, and brow-beaten into believing that a purported “businessman” will know how to run the US government “better.”
It’s really not all that surprising given the context.
Certainly a good 30% of the population will go to their graves insisting that W, Palin, Trump and whatever pond scum comes after this are the best and brightest and are doing a fabulous job, especially if they hate and curse “liberals” (because isn’t that what this all about at the end of the day?).
Bank on it.
And the 1% laughs their azzes off all the way to their off-shore accounts.
You’re forgetting Dan Quayle. I’ve always felt the door was opened with him. Nixon was evil but he wasn’t stupid. Quayle was the first time in recent history when a party made the case for an idiot so close to the presidency. I suppose Chester Arthur was in some ways similar, but I bet he could spell potato.
I concede to your point. I forgot about Quayle, whom my rightwing parents defended ceaselessly, as if he was worth it and somehow smarter than he was. I can say that at least my parents (may they RIP) felt the need to defend Quayle and pretend he was smart. These days, it’s all about how dumb someone is. That’s why Trump extolled how he loved the uneducated. Why wouldn’t he? Next to them, I suppose he appears “smart.” Gah.
There are several issues in this latest show of complete idiocy. First of all, we know from experience that Trump has virtually no knowledge of history, American or otherwise. He has either completely forgotten anything he ever learned, or he never learned. When I think of his intellect vs Obama’s…sigh, nevermind.
So we have a president who doesn’t know or understand the workings of how the Civil War came to be or how past presidents have dealt with the threat of war. Trump can only see things through his narrow gilded lenses, which means he sees history as a series of business deals. Clearly, in Trump’s mind, the US needed a negotiator of his caliber and none of the Civil War would have happened.
And that’s where the tragedy comes in: Trump sees himself as some divine dealmaker. He invites criminal world leaders to come to the White House so he can dazzle them and bend them to his will. He’s so vain that he believes he can bully and bluster or flatter and sweet talk his way to success. But he can’t. And all of the people in his adminstration are afraid to say something other than, “Yessir!”
It’s a scary damn world now that he’s in charge. Ignorance rules!
Just wait until Jeff Sessions tells him that the official name of the conflict is “The War of Northern Aggression.”
Yes intelligence gets insulted all around on this one. The issue in contention in 1861 was not slavery but the extension of slavery into the West. Many state articles of secession laid it out clearly. There’s no excuse for the NY Times missing the extremity of the southern states’s reasons for secession by leaving the issue with “slavery”. The implication is that Lincoln was seeking abolition early on and was not amenable to compromise; that implication is the false root of the Southern justification of its position and of normalizing treason.
Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy convincingly argues that the timing was dictated by Southern politicians realizing that their foreign policy contacts for recognizing the Confederacy might not be around if they tarried too long with Lincoln’s foreign policy team in power.
With Lincoln’s election most Southern politicians understood that there would be fewer slave states based on previous compromises and with Lincoln in power, the army and navy they had just modernized expecting to be in power themselves now went to Lincoln’s command. (Modernization of the army and navy likely made a significant difference in the process of the war.) And they expected Lincoln to very soon be putting free states before the Congress for admittance to the Union. At some point the balance would tip and Congress would end slavery.
So they rushed out on their own and into their self-made catastrophe.
Ain’t no Rodney King moment in the rush to war from the election to the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. Whatever the Southern politicians could do to inflame the situation, they did. Sort of like today’s NRA.
This is totally correct. The first damage was the Missouri Compromise (and arguably that has helped MO to be a pretty racist state) and then the the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It became pretty clear by the 1850s that the Southerners were focused on the expansion of slavery, which BTW would not have worked at all out West but they were stupid shits, too. So the Northern States (northern Democrats and the GOP after the collapse of the Whigs) said “no” as a policy measure but there was no legal recourse to prevent secession, in reality. In fact, the moment the Confederacy was formed they were doomed if the Union decided to fight, which they did reluctantly.
Repeating the irony. During the 1850s, with plantation owners in control of the government, they strengthened and modernized the US Army and US Navy in anticipation of “freeing” the British West Indies back into slavery.
That was the army and navy that beat the Confederate States of America’s various state armies in four years.
That modernization was also the world’s first glimpse at modern total warfare.
Really twitter is at its best with things like this:
did Frederick Douglass respond yet to T’s idea about Jackson and the Civil War?