It’s all too easy these days for people of all political persuasions to believe that people who disagree with us, who fail to see what we can see so plainly, are stupid. Some of them, of course, are stupid, but most are not, and it’s corrosive of decent political discourse to assume they are.
Thus I am troubled by my reaction to this typical center-left critique of Obama by Matt Miller. Not so much by the fact that he knows that “Tea Party Republicans were behind the debt-ceiling standoff that wreaked needless damage on confidence in the United States,” that the Tea Partiers are “the real villains” of the debt crisis (not believes, knows). Some slack should be cut for everyone’s seemingly obligatory partisan claptrap.
No, what bothers me is his blaming Obama for letting
the entirely foreseeable debt-ceiling standoff turn into a hostage drama? Why didn’t he have the spine to say “send me a clean debt limit increase or I’ll raise it myself and see you in court”? How could he leave us in a position where every future debt-limit hike now becomes an occasion for blackmail? And where Chinese officials can blithely say that “the U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone”?
How can he not see — since I can see it so clearly — that it was not the fight over increasing the debt limit that led to that Chinese admonition, it was the fact of our out of control debt? A “clean” debt increase, with no limit in sight on ever increasing debt, would have made things worse, not better.
At least the Chinese are not stupid.
“Some of them, of course, are stupid, but most are not,…”
Excuse me but…with the average IQ “statistically” assigned the base line of 100,
I claim that MOST “big thoughts” are relatively stupider than mine, SOME are not.
Of course, demonstrable IQ cannot be “assigned” by political activists, tee vee talking heads, or “world activists”, unlike casual assignations of “brilliant”, “engaging”, or (gag…hwarf…) intellectual. (whatever THAT is supposed to imply).
On the OTHER hand, which is the stupider ploy?
1. Well, let’s ignore the history of the world, and “compromise” on TALK about this.
2. Well, let’s git ‘er done.