Just How Stupid Can Conservatives Be?

Well, that title may seem a bit inflammatory. And, we have to accept that there are truly stupid (or shall we say mentally challenged) people of all stripes.

However, I'm using the word "Stupid" to mean those folks with apparently reasonable faculties and education who insist on denying reality.

Want an example? Even Novak now publicly concedes that Karl Rove was one of his sources for outing Valerie Plame. Anyone with a reasonable memory recalls that the shrub insisted that he would fire anyone in his administration who was involved in outing Val. That same reasonable memory would remember that the shrub's spokesman insisted that Rove wasn't involved. Then Karl's memory comes back to him, in fits and starts, causing him to repeatedly ask to revisit the Grand Jury to fill in holes in his previous testimony.

No reasonable person can possibly believe that this outing was anything but a political vendetta carried out against someone speaking the truth in public. The facts are all there. Every republican lie (aka "talking point") has been clearly and fully refuted.

Yet today, some imbecile calls into a radio program this afternoon to claim that Joe Wilson arranged for the administration to out his wife - as a means of discrediting the shrub. The correct reaction to this is "Huh?" A simple application of Occum's Razor is enough to establish the foolishness of this claim.

But ignore the obvious stupidity of the claim. If it were true, what would it say of the administration? Their incompetence would be pretty amazing if Joe could do this.

On the other hand, their incompetence is pretty amazing - look at the track record. I wonder what else might Joe Wilson have made them do? Can we all get into this game? I'd like to sell them some swamp land in FLA!

What's worse than outing Valerie Plame, however, is that they've destroyed the CIA. Credible analysis and judgment is necessary in any spying operation. Without an application of unbiased intelligence to all the "data" that's acquired - it's all just so much noise. And that's all that left between the shell of the CIA, and the political hacks in "military intelligence"

A colleague of mine believes everything Rushbaugh has to say. When shown analysis discrediting Rush's rants, this colleague retreats to the assertion that he believes his sources and that I believe mine - and that their is no objective standard by which to analyze the respective reporting. In other words, he denies reality. Not that my reality is necessary any better than his just because its mine. But, between us we ought to be able to come up with a way to determine who's telling the truth about what - and this is what he fundamentally denies. This is really stupid.

If we can't rationally determine what's accurate, at least about our temporal world, than nothing matters. Why should my colleague believe anything? What I say? What he says? If its all unknowable, why should he vote? How does he know when he doesn't feel good? And if he doesn't know that, why should he have an opinion on policy to make him feel better or worse off? But, my colleague isn't smart enough to sort this out.

A sucker may be born every minute, but these examples go beyond being a sucker. So the question is, what's in it for these folks to be so stupid?