Tea Party Mental Failure

The real problem with right wing movements like the Tea Baggers is pretty simple. Many of us sympathize with the complaints about our country's taxation, immigration, and healthcare policies. Many Americans think government has become too large, too incompetent, too invasive, and too unresponsive to be useful to working class citizens. Those are core issues for a majority of citizens.

The problem with the Tea Baggers is that they believe complicated issues can be comprehended, managed, and solved by simple-minded people. It's hard to imagine a problem simple enough for the capacities of characters like Palin, Bachmann, Limbaugh, Beck, and the Faux News doofuses. Stupid people can not solve complicated problems. That's it. There is no issue involving a country of 300 million people or a planet with 6 billion souls that a bonehead like Glenn Beck could resolve. Sarah Palin was incapable of managing a state that has a population that wouldn't fill a decent sized lower-48 city. Not only couldn't she manage that simple state, she didn't have the mental capacity, durability, or courage to stay on the job for one full term.

Like the history of banana republic revolutions, simple people desperately want simple problems. They will always be disappointed. Human history is crowded with the story of cultures looking to idiots and nutcases for solutions and the disappointment that always follows. From Julius Caesar to Napoleon to Hitler to Mao to Idi Amin to G.W. Bush, one moronic nutcase after another has drug his country down the toilet bowl of stupid fantasies.

After 8 years of brain-dead, corrupt Republican foolishness, the appeal of Obama was that the man isn't stupid. That's it. The country was desperate for a leader with an IQ greater than the number of fingers and toes he could count on. The entire Bush Administration couldn't put together as much mental capacity as the Obama family brings to the breakfast table, let alone enough synapse connections to solve simple three variable word problems. After experiencing the usual Republican "Rule by Fool" it was way past time to give up on the desperate hope that idiots might stumble upon a miracle cure for complex problems.

That is consistently the wingnut problem. Smart people don't hang out with stupid people and that leaves Republicans and the Tea Baggers with slim candidate pickings. The fact that conservatives are incapable of humor sadly describes the mental state of wingnuts in general. Not only is "conservative comedy" an oxymoron, but so is "brilliant conservative movie," "conservative think tank," and "Sarah Palin's great idea."

The allergy wingnuts have for "intellectual elites" and "college boys" is a fatal flaw. Economic elites are obvious enemies of the working class: multi-million dollar CEOs, trust fund brats, Wall Street bankers, and that ilk. Grouping economic elites with intellectual elites is so dumb that it ought to be an obvious mistake even to the uneducated. It, apparently, isn’t. “Elite” has a couple of meanings: “1) the socially superior part of society" and 2) "the best of a class.” If we chose “humanity” as the class we are speaking of, selecting “the best” of our species to make complicated decisions is only logical. The “socially superior” elites (of which Bush, Cheney, and most of that clan were perfect representatives) have almost nothing of value to contribute. They are the inbred hillbilly children of robber baron heritage and they represent the most conservative position in society: rich people who want to hang on to their wealth and power at any cost. One type of elite is expert at solving problems the other is only skilled at resisting change. Change is going to happen. Pretending the world is static is conservative and stupid.

Elites of intelligence come from a variety of backgrounds; there are PhD fools and high school dropout geniuses and everything in-between. The common ground smart people occupy is a low tolerance for fools, so it's often tough to entice them into politics. It's really hard to con them into having out with a group of non-stop idiots. As the nation's problems become more obvious and more difficult to solve, the Tea Baggers will, hopefully, become less relevant. However, in this idiocracy they may get a chance to make an even bigger mess of our complicated problems before the majority comes to its senses.

If the majority has any sense left.

The Tea Baggers are in a good position to restart our political system, but they are too well-populated with the same idiots who have created this mess. Somehow, the country needs to create a similar movement, but stock it with intelligent citizens who might offer up intelligent solutions and leadership.

Personally, I think the country needs to return to the system that picked George Washington as the first President. We need to draft the best people, even against their will if necessary. Politics is the kind of job that attracts the wrong people. Anyone who wants the job should be avoided at all costs. For the most part, the people who could best run the country would be happier doing practically anything else. For one, they’d have to hang out with politicians and their supporters and lobbyists. Anybody with a lick of sense would flee the country rather than put up with an hour suffering that crowd.