On July 23, “Idiot America” author Charles P. Pierce lectures David Shuster about Liz Cheney and idiots in America, including the “birther movement.” (Mark Schreiber)
But how new is this? Sinclair Lewis said all this years ago in “Elmer Gantry”, “Main Street” and “Babbitt”, and of course he's not the only one (just one of those who said it best).
It seems that Americans have revelled in ignorance and stupidity in their leaders and also in their everyday beliefs for a long time - since the 19th century, anyway. Having numbskulls (and criminals) like Gordon Liddy on TV and taking them seriously (not to mention the continued financial gains made by crackpots like Limbaugh, Coulter, O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck, and their poisonous ilk) are further proof that many Americans do not wish to think rationally.
The anti-intellectual attitude of many Americans has made them laughing-stocks to the “civilized” Europeans (the quotes are there for a reason), and GWB for many non-Americans was the perfect representative of his country: ignorant *and* stupid, parochial, bound to an outmoded primitive belief system, and too ready to use violence to settle differences of opinion.
Until America as a nation proceeds beyond a kindergarten level of emotions and rationality, it should drop its self-applied label as “the world's cop” and stay well out of other nations' affairs, remove its stormtroopers from other nations (how would the USA fancy a Japanese battle fleet stationed at Annapolis?) and grow up.
On September 12, 2001, my mother (a conservative by British standards) said to me over the phone after watching Bush's “patriotic” response to the appalling terrorist acts of September 12, “The Americans are still children - they haven't grown up yet”. How right she was.
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