Idiots? Really?

A friend of my recently suggested I check out the Democratic Underground, in particular for a weekly column called The Top Ten Conservative Idiots. I appreciate (and aspire to) semantic precision, and so I was already annoyed by the column's title. Does the writer really believe that all of his weekly "conservative idiots" are genuine idiots. I can certainly agree that much of what they say and do is idiotic, in the sense that their words and deeds reveal a great ignorance to the truth of my values and views, but I don't really think they are incapable of ordinary acts of reasoning. The list of idiots this week includes Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay, the Bush administration, George Bush, Pat Robertson and Lonnie Latham. Mr. Latham, whom I know nothing about, excepted, the only person on this list who I might label an idiot is Pat Robertson. Certainly, most everything he says is idiotic. And yet, the man has his own TV station and he is at present in talks with the Israeli government about creating a religious theme park in Jerusalem. The principal market would be American evangelicals. Though I find it abhorrent, I must also admit that it is a rather good idea. As for Abramoff, Delay, Bush and his administration, I think it is disingenuous, and more importantly, intellectually lazy, to call them idiots. Oh, and I think it's ineffectual. If the ability to put a cogent sentence together is a good proxy for intelligence, Bush is certainly not the smartest cookie, but the members of his administration, though perhaps morally bankrupt, are (mostly) far from being idiots. Same too for Abramoff and Delay.

Even if I still dislike the presentation, I did enjoy parts of Top Ten Conservative Idiots of the Week. I had the same thoughts as the writer when I first saw pictures of Ambramoff in his black trench coat and fedora (is he trying to look like a mobster?). Perhaps it says something about the amount of news I read that only about a quarter of what was presented was new to me, which is probably part of why I didn't find the article engaging enough to be certain that I'll make it part of my weekly reading, but it may have also had something to do with the lame "HA HA HA" interjections in the piece about Delay.

My dislike of the article centres on the question of partisan confrontational politics versus some sort of more idealized, issues and values based politics. For me, which one you choose depends on how you conceive of the fight. If the goal is to win power by trouncing the opponent, then partisan mongering is perhaps the way to go. But it seems like we still mostly live in a democracy and that we must eventually win power by convincing people to vote for the Democrats. I just don't think "HA HA HA" wins any votes. That said, I have nothing against having a few laughs at the expense of the other side, as long as we keep our entertainment separate from our message (though I should perhaps remember Jon Stewart's pleading "you're hurting America" during his second apperance on Crossfire). Maybe I'm too naive, perhaps we in the US really do live under a junta—one could say that Bush seized power with the help of the Supreme Court and he is, by virtue of his position, a military officer, but I don't think we've reached the horrors of a latin-american dictatorship, which is what the word 'junta' connotes to me. (I might also add that if the Bush administration is a junta, then there is little reason not to apply the label to Hugo Chavez' government. Chavez's "Bolivarian revolution" may be good for his country's much abused poor in the short term, but his tenure will have a pernicious effect on his country over the long-term.) I just don't find statements like this, from an article (also from the Democratic Underground) by Daniel Patick Welch entitled "Pants on Fire: The Liars of the Bush Administration will take the world down in flames if we let them"compelling:

"Sam Alito is merely the latest liar on the block for Bush's full spectrum dominance agenda. But the show-trial hearings on whether this proto-fascist ideologue should be allowed to shape US social and political development for a generation provide some nuggets of insight into how the corrupt junta's pathological liars actually work.

The first order of amazement is that the process can actually take place. Shouldn't precedence be given to hearings on impeaching and imprisoning the corporate cronies who lied us into war? Business As Usual, is, as usual, the most effective weapon in the arsenal of the criminal cabal that has seized control of the US."

The rest of the article is actually quite good. It contains many good points and the writing isn't bad, but its power to convince readers who don't already agree is entirely squandered by the adolescent bombast of the introduction and lines like the following that are peppered throughout, "when Baby Doc Bush tried to appoint his own lawyer, his christofascist paymasters seethed with rage and responded with one voice: "You shut up, and remember why we put you in office in the first place." The swaggering phony cowboy obediently caved, and Harriet Myers made way for Sam Alito." I used to write with that kind of grandiose rhetoric in highschool when I was fighting the global capitalist conspiracy to destroy the earth and its inhabitants. Now, I'm not actually saying his analysis is entirely wrong (I think he's partly right but tends to oversimplify issues), but his rhetoric, though sometimes entertaining, is ineffectual.