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Who Runs this Country? It's the stupid, Stupid!
By the Cynic
[email protected]

12/7/2000

Stupidity expands exponentially. What is happening in Florida, and during the entire election for that matter, proves this axiom.

During the Presidential campaign, the media spent an enormous amount of time devoted to the "undecided voter." This irritated me. For the most part, these undecideds were people who knew little about the candidates and even less about the issues. These are the same people that Jay Leno and the newsmagazine Dateline were doing 'man on the street' interviews with to see if people could even identify the candidates and the party to which party they belonged. Of course, many couldn't.

Are these people dumb? I don't know. I do know that they can name every Beatles album chronologically. I do know that they not only know who Pamela Andersen Lee is, but they know that she had breast implants, had them taken out and then had them put back in again. What affect these things have on these people's lives is beyond me. The government can influence their day-to-day life, and they don't seem to care.  But if Catherine Zeta Jones marries a dusty old bag, they can't wait to shell out a buck eighty to find out about it. The tragedy here is that these people get a vote.

I, on the other hand, took the time to learn about the candidates. I became well versed on policy and on which stances the candidates took on issues and why. I also got a vote.

Is it fair? No. Life is never fair.  I learned that early.

I also learned that for a ballot to be valid, you can only pick one candidate per race. I learned that you must look to see where you are punching the hole to be sure you select correctly. I learned that the punch must go all the way through the paper ballot for the vote to be tallied. It wasn't that hard.

Unlike our electoral college, our votes are not weighted. You could stumble out of a bar and write in 'Zippy the Pinhead' and your vote counts. You could cast your vote for Al Gore based only on the fact that he kissed his wife on the TV and your vote counts. You can vote for George Bush only because you like his Dad and your vote counts. As Al Gore likes to say, "every vote should count." Should they?

The crux of the Florida situation is that people are too dimwitted to use the ballot correctly. This is how it works in America - nothing gets done until we discover the will of the stupid.

The stupid have been running this country for decades. I would guess that 90% of all laws on the books are there because one ignoramus did something stupid. Our elected officials spend an inordinate amount of time protecting the stupid. At any given time, some legislature is debating on a law because someone, somewhere thought that using a moving city bus to open a can of beans was a good idea.

When I hear that some mental midget decided to drive his snowmobile on a lake in April and plummets through the thin ice to his demise, I believe it to be God's way of weeding out the stupid. Meanwhile city and State Legislators decide to outlaw all snowmobiles on the lake.

There was a time when disclaimers on products were put there after someone did something stupid. If someone decided to eat the silicon packet in a vitamin bottle, they would begin printing DO NOT EAT on the packet . These days, if you are a manufacturer of any product you will have to divine what kinds of stupid things that stupid people will do with your product and write a disclaimer accordingly. This is why most disclaimers are two pages long.

The reward for stupidity used to be a hard lesson learned. Now it's a jury trial with 12 other stupid people and a multimillion dollar jackpot. Any time you mix litigators with incompetents you know someone is getting rich.

Any species in the wild allows the stupid and weak of the pack to be eaten by hyenas. We, being humans, are the only species that understands the concept of compassion for the stupid. It may be our biggest fault.

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Today's featured columns: 
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Dorothy Anne Seese has a suggestion as to why Gore is dragging things out

Whining in America, Part 3 of 3; Whining is for Losers-Two Views with Kirsten Andersen and Amy Krause

 Join the conversation about the election...

© The Cynic, 2000

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