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RE: China is smart
By PaterPelligrino on 7/22/2010 1:05:51 AM , Rating: 5
What you forget is that this is exactly the same thing that people were saying about Bush. And before him, Clinton...and effectively every president ever.

*that* is what shows the mindset of the American people

Stupidity is precisely the problem with politics in the US, but not primarily the stupidity of our politicians - after all, in a democracy the people get who they vote for - but of the American people. Time and again, polls have shown that a majority of Americans can't find England on a map; almost half believe that Jesus is coming back in the next 50 years to punish the sinners. (What are the foreign-policy consequences for a democratic country where half the voting public thinks the Sky Fairy promised the territory of Israel to the Jewish people?)

What else but American stupidity can explain public figures like Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Jerry Falwell. We're a country of morons who worship idiots because they believe - or pretend to believe, which is usually the case with these charlatans - the same stupid things we do. In no other country is intelligence a liability in a politician.

A democracy requires an electorate sufficiently well educated to select politicians that will serve the public good, or at the very least, intelligent enough to know what the public good is. That is most emphatically not the case in the good old US of A, city on the hill and beacon of hope to all mankind.

RE: China is smart
By knutjb on 7/22/2010 1:27:01 AM , Rating: 2
A democracy might, in your opinion, require such things. Our Democratic-Republic gives you the freedom to work as hard as you choose, or be as ignorant as you choose. You make it sound as if all the morons are in the US. I have traveled to many countries and they all have the same kind of problems in varying degrees.

When you decide that there must be an intelligence test to be able to vote you are using a very dangerous progressive moral relativism. What makes us great is the very thing you're whining about. Sure people do many dumb things but that is their right to do so.

I know several incredibly "intelligent" people who don't have the sense to find their way out open box with a map and flash light. Intelligence comes in many forms and academic intelligence is filled with many who might know a lot of things but have little or no real world experience in making things happen though they do have an abundance in the theoretical world...

