Donald Trump on waterboarding: 'Even if it doesn't work they deserve it'

[whatthehey]

24. Do any of you spend time on bar stools or diner stools outside bright blue enclaves?

This isn't "crazy" or "extreme" in relation to the zeitgeist of the American masses. If you hear what the normal folk, the salt of the earth, the common man....you know, morons (thanks Gene) say when they get together for anything other than "bring a vegan nut-free gluten-free dish to share in our potluck to raise money for distressed Kazakh lacemakers" type meetings, you'd hear that all Trump is doing is playing the suckers in true Barnum fashion, based on the limited lizard brain scope that it's oh-so-politically-incorrect to mention is all most people rely on, or have the mental capacity to handle. It's why his trashy faux-Louis XVI decor screams wealth and taste and his blustering says alpha male to the same mouth-breathing audience.

He's not inciting oe causing or even exacerbating this idiocy. He's giving it a microphone. In this day of everyone is equal and IQ means nothing and it's rude to correct grammar mistakes because that's so prescriptive, somebody needs to stand up and say that a lot of people are flat out uninformed, mentally incurious, and intellectually incapable of nuanced or lateral thinking. And no they are not all Republican, or all white, or all suburban, or all male, or all fat. They are legion, and everywhere, and our education system has for decades stressed that they should be considered equally valuable mentally as any PhD or polymath. We don't pretend that the huge number of people who will never break a 6 second 40yd or be able to throw a football more than 20 yds or grow over 6' tall are equally valuable as NFL players, but we've told two or three generations of shambling buffoons who think that tossing three heads in a row increases the probability that the next one will be tails that their brains and intellects are just "different, but just as good" when compared to a genius.

And what has that wrought? Almost an entire electorate, left and right, who thinks they, or the guy on the bar stool next to them, has just as much insight into global trade as Krugman and just as worthy opinions on the Middle East as a career foreign service analyst and that they can see through the "ivory tower bullshit". And they have decided that if uneducated pig-ignorant goobers like themselves all think that terrorists (aka brown skinned folks except Vishal at the help desk) should be thumbscrewed until they larn' not to mess with the big dawg US of A then so should the politicians. And lo, one such, not coincidentally a lifetime huckster, suddenly appears.

There have always beewn dull, mentally vapid people in huge numbers. But we, as in much of the west, only got dull mentally vapid leadership when we persuaded those dull mentally vapid voters that they were something else. Look around countries which have strenuous, intellectually streamed and performance-segregated education systems. Any of them have a GWB just gone and a Trump just pending?