Perspective on America’s State of Political Affairs — Writing so Good from Richard Cohen and Dana Milbank that I Have to Quote a Few Words

© 2012 Peter Free

 

25 September 2012

 

 

Columnist Kathleen Parker and I wrote a while back that we think people are getting stupider — meaning that they seem to be incapable of dragging their brains out of bed

 

Here’s another way of putting the same thought, this time from columnist Richard Cohen:

 

In 1980 Ronald Reagan won the Republican nomination. He beat a future president, George H.W. Bush; two future Senate majority leaders, Howard Baker and Bob Dole; and two lesser-known congressmen.

 

This year Mitt Romney won the GOP nomination. He beat a radio host, a disgraced former House speaker, a defeated Senate candidate, a former appointee of the Obama administration, a tongue-tied Texas governor, a prevaricating religious zealot who happens to serve in the House of Representatives and a cranky libertarian doctor. Where did all the talent go?

 

Until the Republican Party can answer this question, it makes no sense to continue to carp about Mitt Romney and the startlingly incompetent presidential campaign he’s running. His faults as a politician are manifest.

 

He is robotic, unknowable (his own wife asserted at the national convention that “he made me laugh” and then failed to cite a single humorous moment), ideologically incoherent and severely out of touch with the average American.

 

He is his party’s nominee because, like the one-eyed man in the valley of the blind, he is just the best of the worst.

 

© 2012 Richard Cohen, The Republican brain drain, Washington Post (24 September 2012) (paragraphs split)

 

Unfortunately, with time’s passage, more and more people will have forgotten the intellectually capable leadership examples that George H.W. Bush and Howard Baker admirably set.

 

 

Republicans are not alone in making dumb choices — as Dana Milbank points out

 

He wrote:

 

It bordered on scandalous that Obama, joined by the first lady, would make time to sit down with the women of “The View” even as he declined foreign leaders’ requests to meet with him one on one in New York this week.

 

Obama hasn’t held a formal news conference in the White House in more than six months, but he has found places on his calendar for Leno, Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, People, “Entertainment Tonight” and, of course, “The View.”

 

But Mitt Romney isn’t in an ideal position to press Obama on his priorities.

 

This is because the Republican presidential nominee and his wife, Ann, just spent some quality time on the set of “Live! With Kelly and Michael,” where they discussed, among other things, Snooki, peanut butter and chocolate milk, their toothpaste-squeezing techniques, Romney’s singing of western tunes while on horseback and what the candidate wears to bed.

 

© 2012 Dana Milbank, Obama makes room for ‘The View’, Washington Post (24 September 2012) (paragraphs split and reordered)

 

Milbank goes on to provide added examples of the kind of stupidities these two presidential candidates are pushing.

 

 

Fortunately — as the United States swirls around history’s Greatness Flush — we will be able to document our sewer travel on Facebook and Twitter

 

That’s all that matters, isn’t it?  Posting inane bits of narcissistic tidbits for voyeurs to vacuously sip from minute to minute?

 

Admittedly, I cannot imagine President Bush 41 or former Secretary of State Howard Baker debasing their worth in such trivialized ways.  Greatness has standards.

 

But times change, don’t they?

 

 

The moral? — They say that stink goes away, once you get used to it

 

We’ll see each other in the cesspool with Baminator, the Mittster, and everyone else who’s too silly to understand what capable leadership and citizenship both require.

 

The good thing is that gas-filled human waste floats.  Perhaps the angels of our better natures will eventually alight and rise on fecal vapor’s stench.

 

Is that magical thinking?  Is it warm in here?