Our Political Class, At Their Near-Worst

      At their best, politicians can inspire or (thanks to a good choice in speechwriters) amuse.  But at their (non-criminal) worst?

      Oh, my dear heavens.  It's important to remember that these are the people who, as kids, spent much of their time campaigning for Student Council and arguing over minutia if they won; the kids who schemed and conspired to become Prom royalty or spent endless hours practicing so they could lead the jai alai team.  The one thing many of them never did was study the dull, boring stuff like math, history, geography or science, and they certainly avoided Shop and Home Ec.

      And thus we get Congressthings worrying Guam might flip over, advocating for the unlimited printing of paper money or claiming a voluntary, free vaccination program is akin to the Holocaust.  It's cringeworthy, and made even more so by partisans wanting to claim that A) what their guy or gal said wasn't really that outrageous and it was really parody besides, plus B) have you heard what the other side's idiots have said?

      Yeah, no.  I've seen the clips.  These nitwits mean it when they threaten to nationalize an oil company or shrug off deadly civil unrest as no big deal.  Furthermore, there is no Grand Compensating Balance of damfoolishness: what conservative witlings say is not cancelled out by what liberal witlings say, and vice versa: it's additive.  Idiocy on the part of elected officials just piles up, higher and higher, dumber and dumber, like the dung-heap under a garderobe.

      Pretending you don't notice the smell doesn't make it go away.

      When you vote, no matter who you vote for, I beg you: check their record (especially public utterances) and don't vote for idiots.  Whatever else you do, we have got to start sieving out the ones who are only getting in on ideological purity and other people's money.  I'm starting to miss LBJ and Spiro Agnew pretty badly; they were many things, a lot of which were negative, but at least they weren't nitwits.  No matter how happy a politician's positions and attitudes may make you, if they're ignorant or stupid, once elected they will do more harm than good.  We can't afford it.