The Brits voted in Parliament recently to jump into the war against ISIS. The United States Congress, that accumulation of cowardly punks, left town rather than stand up for one position or another on the war. Boehner’s excuse; that it would be bad for lame duck congressmen to vote on an issue like that, is pure bullshit. The congressmen are only lame because they won’t get off their cowardly asses and vote. Instead, as has been the case for the last six years, congress is AWOL.
Maybe Boehner really believes, as he has ludicrously stated, that it isn’t important for congress to do its job now, but if he does, he should be kicked out of office. If these lazy, cowardly, ignorant slobs don’t want to work for their oversized paychecks it’s the duty of the American voter to replace them with someone who will. Just like congress the voters didn’t do their duty last month.
But how do these lazy, brain dead, incompetent losers keep their jobs? It’s pretty simple. They are getting the votes of people who are so lacking in intelligence or interest that they should not be allowed to vote at all. Bill Maher played a piece of film shot by documentary filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi which shows dramatically, the reason we get the kind of dummies in congress that we do.
She shows that there are people in this country that didn’t actually know that we had an election coming up but that would eventually find out and actually vote in it. The Nun’s on the Bus, a political activist group, interviewed potential voters in Minnesota. One guy, who looks like he might have been able to walk and chew gum, favors planned parenthood, is for marriage equality, giving women equal pay for the same job and believes that we should have a sane immigration policy; all nice intelligent positions, right? Then he’s asked if he knows who his current congressman is and he didn’t. Then we found out that he didn’t know who was running or what they believed in. Then he was asked, how, if he didn’t know the candidates, he will know which one to vote for. He says that he always votes the Republican line, regardless.
This charming, friendly guy is really a democratic, small “d” disaster. He should not be allowed to vote because he has no idea what he is actually voting for. He is in the district of a Republican named John Kline who had done nothing for his constituents for the entire time he had been in office and refused to make any statement of position even with an election looming. Why won’t he make a position statement? Easy. He didn’t have a position…, on anything. He has remained in office simply by being a Republican in a gerrymandered district. The guy who’s going to vote for him because his name is on the Republican line, regardless of what he does or doesn’t stand for, is what makes a shambles of the democratic process and is the kind of guy that incompetent congressman depends on to keep them in office. P.S. Kline won.
But what’s to be done? It’s a very serious question. We’ve all read and said a great deal about gerrymandering, and ID cards, and poll taxes and all the things that both sides, but mostly the GOP have done to restrict voting privileges. Do we really want to restrict them even more by having some kind of intelligence test for voters? The answer is sort of yes and no, because we don’t want to restrict voting rights but we also don’t want people voting who don’t understand what they are voting for or about.
So what’s left? How about education? How about that old fall-back that we used to rely on to set us up for life? Now I don’t know much about what is being taught in grade school and high school now-a-days but I have it on good authority that it’s not civics, that almost no school curriculum in the country has civics in it. Like geography, civics has disappeared into the foggy shadows of the past. Those in the know were worried that we didn’t know enough math to push the science programs or enough foreign languages to appear conversant with the people we were invading overseas. They’ve added drama courses, art courses, design courses, all kinds of sports programs but they decided that civics, the study of how the country runs just wasn’t important enough. So what did we get left with? A bunch of dummies that don’t know how the government works or who’s involved in it.
I seem to remember back in pre-historic America when civics was kind of an interesting course. Maybe if more kids took it now, there’d be more qualified young people going into government as a profession. The only people going into politics now are the ones who took economics and have figured out how to sell their souls to the richest lobbyist. Making people take intelligence tests before they can vote is probably unconstitutional, but teaching them civics so they have some idea how a functional government is supposed to work is a definite necessity. Maybe the real answer is to force candidates to take those intelligence tests. There are certainly more than enough dummies in congress right now.