Stupidest People Alive: The Competition Heats Up

Donald Luskin is going to have to work very hard to keep his title. Just saying.

Here we have Charles Krauthammer, who wrote that:

Times Online: the idea of teaching intelligent design -- creationism's "modern step-child" -- was "insane". "To teach it as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of a religious authority," [Krauthammer] wrote. "To impose it on the teaching of evolution is ridiculous."

But, Krauthammer goes on to say, even though teaching it is insane, for George W. Bush to advocate teaching it is clever and good:

Times Online: [Krauthammer] added: "If you look at this purely as a cynical political move, it will help in the heartlands and people of my ilk care a lot more about Iraq than about textbooks in Kansas."

And here, from National Review, we have Cliff May positing that all spouses of American diplomats should be suspected of being undercover CIA agents:

The Corner on National Review Online: VALERIE WILSON A.K.A. VALERIE PLAME [Cliff May]From Wizbang via Instapundit: "So, via Who's Who, the name 'Valerie Plame' has been associated publicly with Joe Wilson since the Clinton era - nice secret..." Yes, and you see what this means? It means that for years, anyone who met Valerie Plame while she was "under cover" posing as an energy analyst for a private company could have very easily found out from the most open of sources that she was married to an American diplomat.

You think that might have made them a tad suspicious that she could have some kind of link to the U.S. government? Nah! Again, what this really suggests is that the agency's tradecraft had become as sloppy as its analysis...

We also have Kathryn Lopez, who cannot be described by mere words:

Roger Ailes: Kathryn Jean Lopez:

I CERTAINLY KNOW LIFE DIDN'T BEGIN IN THE FALL OF 2001, BUT... [Kathryn Jean Lopez] Am I wrong to be justifiably uncomfortable with the Hiroshima headline in the Washington Post today? "The Original Ground Zero." Anyone who's lived in America in the past few years knows what "Ground Zero" conjures up. What we dropped in Japan is such a complicated question. What was done to us on 9/11/01 has no reasonable-people-can-disagree justification. I am pretty sure I am reading way too much into that Post headline, but it left me feeling like it should have been written some other way.

"Ground Zero" at Hiroshima has been called "Ground Zero" since 1945:

Ground zero - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Ground zero... in the case of a bomb designed to explode in the air, it refers to the point on the ground directly below the bomb at the moment of detonation.... [I]t is, of course, the point of highest damage. Around that spot are drawn concentric circles showing how far out from the impact point the damage is. The term has chiefly come to be associated with nuclear explosions, but is also used for earthquakes, epidemics and other disasters.

It was military slang--used at the Trinity site where the weapon tower for the first nuclear weapon was at point 'zero'--and moved into general use very shortly after the end of World War II...

Comments

[Derelict]

And that fact that the right is as ignorant as a box of doorknobs surprises you, how, exactly?

It revels in ignorance. Indeed, it can only exist in an all-enveloping environment of ignorance. Thus does it work to create and perpetuate ignorance. ID and creationism MUST be just as valid as evolution so that people are unable to distinguish facts established by science and fantasy propounded by demagogues. Joe Wilson having a wife MUST be equivalent to him proclaiming that she worked for the CIA so that no Republican operatives go to jail. Ground Zero MUST refer solely to the twin towers so that we can continue to wrap ourselves in our special victimhood.

[Mark-NC]

I think you are being to hard on a rare piece from Charles Krauthammer that doesn't make me want to gag.

What he is stating actually makes your point. He says "If you look at this purely as a cynical political move, it will help in the heartlands and people of my ilk care a lot more about Iraq than about textbooks in Kansas."

By that he means that the war supporters care about war and are not so conceerned about religion. The religious folks don't pay much attention to the war (or ignore it) but will reap praise on Bush for this gesture.

Neither side (my implication) gives a damn about the truth, or what's in the best interest of the USA.

So, it is a positive for Bush given the programmed ignorance of his actual base of voters.

[howard]

well, i think we can rule out krauthammer, whose problem is insanity, not stupidity.

with k-lo, we have to examine the question of whether not having any intelligence makes you "stupid," or whether stupid should be reserved for intelligent people who can't actually seem to apply their intelligence to the situation at hand (i'm agnostic on the question myself).

but cliff may's notion, which apparently is that the cia should forbid its agents from marrying members of the diplomatic corps, absolutely merits the label "stupid:" cliff isn't an idiot, but by playing one online, he meritsthe term "stupid," although it would take some deep talmudic pondering to place him and luskin on a hierarchy (and k-lo, if we count her in).

[pgl]

Luskin, KLo, Cliff May. If you add Kudlow, Steven Moore, Tom Nugent, Jerry Bowyer - did you see a pattern? Oh yea - those folks Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg rely upon to write copy for the National Review. Let's hope teachers are assigning their students something else as examples of conservative thought.

[spencer]

Given that young single CIA officer and foreign services officers frequently serve in the same foreign posting it would be logical to assume that a number of marriages between the two groups would occur. But that does not matter in this case. They were married in 1998 and since that time they did not serve together at multiple foreign assignments. If you were a foreign intelligence analyst you and were trying to identify a pattern you would look for people that had the same foreign assignment time after time. Otherwise, how would you find a pattern of unusual behavior that would lead you to suspect one was a CIA officer?

Moreover, at no time has it been made public that at some earlier time her cover was different. CIA officer do not always use the same cover. Just as other US government employees often move from one agency to another, CIA agents will sometimes change cover when
undertaking a new assignment.

My question for the people making up these untrue rationalizations what is so great about your political philosophy that you think it justifies being so dishonest.
If my political philosophy required to me to repeatedly lie I would come to doubt the validity of my philosophy.
Why doesn't that enter your thinking?

[save_the_rustbelt]

Luskin is so far ahead he will have the title forever, unless George Bush starts writing columns.

But before liberals start crowing, you gave us Al Gore and John/Theresa Kerry, so you guys made a major contribution toward electing Bush.

[Laughing Historian]

"before liberals start crowing, you gave us Al Gore and John/Theresa Kerry, so you guys made a major contribution toward electing Bush."

Liberals also held a gun to your head and forced you to vote for Bush.

Danged liberals! Why can't they nominate someone who's perfect for a change?

[Mr. Montesquieu]

"krauthammer, whose problem is insanity, not stupidity."

Krauthammer's problem is neither insanity nor stupidity, but simply utter contempt for the American people, including most of the people who are supposedly on his side.

It's the sort of contempt that a con artist feels towards the mark: "those dumb goobers are actually putting on those funny-looking suits and going halfway around the world to get their asses blown off because of what we're telling them[crying with laughter]."

[Mr. Montesquieu]

"My question for the people making up these untrue rationalizations what is so great about your political philosophy that you think it justifies being so dishonest."

The question is irrelevant for those whose political philosophy entails a large measure of dishonesty. The ghost of Leo Strauss hovers over contemporary American conservatism, guiding it towards ever-expanding horizons of elitist deceit.

[peapod]

Via Billmon @ http://billmon.org/archives/002069.html
---------------
The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life . . .
Such organizations, of course, must have leaders; there must be men in them whose ignorance and imbecility are measurably less abject than the ignorance and imbecility of the average. These super-Chandala often attain to a considerable power, especially in democratic states. Their followers trust them and look up to them; sometimes, when the pack is on the loose, it is necessary to conciliate them. But their puissance cannot conceal their incurable inferiority. They belong to the mob as surely as their dupes, and the thing that animates them is precisely the mob's hatred of superiority. Whatever lies above the level of their comprehension is of the devil.

H.L. Menken
Homo Neanderthalensis
June 1925

[KevinNYC]

The Ground Zero comment is spectacularly stupid. Stupid enough, that I would be embarrassed, if I posted on the same board with her.

[liberal]

save_the_rustbelt wrote, "But before liberals start crowing, you gave us Al Gore and John/Theresa Kerry, so you guys made a major contribution toward electing Bush."

Stupidity. Particularly from someone who was idiotic enough to vote for Bush in 2000, as you've admitted elsewhere.

Gore didn't owe his nomination to "liberals," but rather the fact that he was a sitting vice president. At the time I thought---and still do think---that the notion that certain people (like sitting vice presidents) "deserve" the nomination is silly.

Of course, Gore, with all his faults (and he's hardly a liberal, if you look at his entire career), would have made a much better president than George "everything I touch turns to sh*t" Bush.

As for Kerry, I don't think "we liberals" are responsible for him, either. Going into Iowa and New Hampshire, I wasn't all that thrilled with any of the candidates on offer. OTOH, he also would have made a much better president than Bush. Which isn't saying much.

[Matt Austern]

Oh, I think it's fair to call Kerry a liberal. He's hardly a very strident liberal, but he isn't from the centrist-conservative wing of the Democratic Party either.

I wouldn't blame the fact that he ran a poor campaign on his being a liberal, though. More likely it's because he's a Senator.

[Robert Waldmann]

I have also nominated Robert Luskin the leaking lawyer. He's done some work for his client Rove which has earned him my undying gratitude.

I think you understate K.Lo's incredible idiocy. I am appalled that anyone has managed to forget that Hiroshima was the *original* ground zero. However I am befuddled speachless and dumbstruck (good thing I'm typing not trying to talk) by someone who claims to have read the Post headline and worries about reading too much into it, and doesn't even grasp the possibility that it is a literal statement of fact, which explicitely explains that the phrase "Ground Zero" entered common discussion as a reference to ground zero Hiroshima (don't forget the zip code). This is not just ignorance. K.Lo also displays functional illiteracy. Even if she had never heard of Hiroshima, she should have understood that some spot in Hiroshima became the original ground zero evidently some time before Sept 11 2001.

As to Krauthammer, the only thing that scares me in his article his use of the plural. I really, really hope that there is only one person of his ilk. In fact, when I think of two people of his ilk perhaps meeting and reproducing, my mind involuntarily shifts to the post above which notes many horrible consequences of inbreeding. That is, I imagine their offspring would be like the creater touching Adam.

[theorajones]

"Ground Zero" is more than just Hiroshima--it's the center of the bullseye where a nuclear weapon hits. Hiroshima is just the most famous of all Ground Zeros.

This is simply not obscure knowedge. For chrissake, there was a ska tune in '85 about nuclear war called "Party at Ground Zero."

http://www.lyricsdir.com/fishbone-party-at-ground-zero-lyrics.html

If a frigging ska band knew the etymology of the term, I don't think it's too much to expect of a right-wing pundit.

[save_the_rustbelt]

When Kerry was in Ohio and Michigan, he owned an SUV.

When Kerry was on the east and west coast, he didn't.

Apparently he thinks people in Ohio are too stupid to read out-of-town newspapers.

I voted for him anyway, even though he didn't have a coherent economic plan or foreign policy, because the Rove administration is such a mess.

And Luskin is still the goofball emeritus of columnists.

[n.o.l.t.f.]

Fishbone. It was a song about how we're all going to burn anyway, might as well celebrate. The also wrote a prescient work on the Bush Era: "Lyin' Ass Bitch".

But rustbelt, come on, the people in Ohio are too stupid to breathe, let alone read out of state newspapers. It's the only conclusion I can come to, given the evidence.

[KevinNYC]

Right on Theora, Fishbone rule. You just sent me to google.

http://www.fishbone.net/ has their videos. You can go see Party at Ground Zero

I just found out they are playing in NYC with the Red Hot Chili Peppers later this month.

I would bet any shirless horn player with a funny haircut you could find is smarter than Kathryn Jean Lopez

[Roger Bigod]

The Krauthammer piece is amusing for the middle-class status insecurity. Real version: "Creationists are downscale trash, and I want everybody to know that I went to high-class schools. OTOH, it is a Good Thing that downscale trash encourage their children to be cannon fodder for my causes." Perhaps the last part isn't so amusing.

The class inferences to be drawn from using the word "heartlands" with a straight face are left as an exercise.

[piotr]

I think we are too hard on Kathryn Lopez. True, before 9/11 the phraze "ground zero" was used for the central point of an explosion of an atomic bomb. "Ground zero" spot was surround be "zones of destructions, zone 1, everything flattened while people survive mostly as shades cast on surviving wall fragments, zone two, firestorms, etc.

Thus the usage "ground zero" in WTC site started as a hyperbolic metaphore for a center of a terrible destruction. However, the original strikes were followed by concentric zones of epistemological devastation in which all previous usages were altered, with definitions being twisted and shards of broken logic littering the ground.

In the wake of this devastation, uttering "ground zero" means "from now on, we shall be forever blameless, however much ass we kick". Using this phrase for another site suggest, unjustifiedly, that another country is forver blameless as well. No sir! The epistomological devastation is a huge ball extending in all 4 dimensions of the time-space, obliterating the moral claims that any other country (or any other political party) could raise. Proper usages of the term "ground zero" are restricted to, well, we have discussed that. Proper usages of the term "nuclear bombs" are restricted to sentences like "terrorists plot to put their hands on a nuclear bomb" or "we must consider dropping nuclear bombs on Islamic holy sites".