Ernest Goes To Government

Tom Marino, Pennsylvania pol and flunker of geography.

First we had Sarah Palin thinking Africa was a country. Now we have Tom Marino (R-PA) not knowing that Libya is part of Africa.

Jeez, I'm sick of these idiots.

How does a clueless f*ck like Marino get to help run a country when he clearly knows less about countries than most fifth-graders forget during recess? Screw the vogue-ish "big government" bull - it's not big government that's dangerous, it's dumb government. And that's what Marino, Michele Bachmann, John Cornyn, et al., are representing to the fullest.

Ponder on how America was a product of the Enlightenment... WTF happened? When did we throw out the rarified intellectualism of the founding fathers and go all "Ernest Goes To Government" instead? When did we go from James Garfield writing Latin and Greek simultaneously to idiots like Joe "You Lie" Wilson who seem scarcely capable of crayoning their own names? Was it the folksy anti-smartypantsism of Reagan that lowered the bar? Was it Gingrich's dullard 'revolution' of the 90s  that lowered our expectations? Did Bubba's blow job somehow make us give up on the idea of transcendent leadership? I don't know... but, at some point, we obviously did give up and decided it was OK to have idiots lead us. And now our federal and state governments teeter on the brink of collapse.

This is scary sh*t.

So I'd be 100% on-board with Crooks and Liars in wondering whether now would be a good time to institute a basic competence test for elected officials. For "dumb" America, that would be a great first step forward on the road to recovery. You don't know where Libya is? Then f*ck off out of the capitol and get a job at Subway. Wouldn't we all be safer for it?

Random (Moving) Picture Of The Day

Rick Perry's never been the sharpest tool in the box. But this Freudian slip? Ha!

Quote of the Day (So Far...)

"You're Not Gonna Spoil My Juice Right Now. You're not gonna take this high away from me."

MC Steele on Morning Joe. Is he smoking crack? Has he denied it yet..?

Coup de Dumbass

When North Carolina Republican senator Phil Berger pushed a wheelbarrow full of Republican surveys into Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue's office, he thought he was executing a high-five-worthy dick move on behalf of the RNC.

But Berger hadn't bothered to read through many of the completed surveys before passing them on. So when the governor's staff skimmed through them, they found comments addressed to Berger's own party like "I am embarrassed to be associated with this organization. Your tactics are disgusting and you're going to lose a generation of voters" and "Stop wording questions so geared up to get the answers you want."

I still can't get used to today's Republicans. They're every bit the amoral slime they were a few years back when Karl Rove drove the bus. But somewhere along the road, they seem to have sloughed off a few trillion collective brain cells and regressed into the moronic amoral slime they are today.

Unfortunately I'm paranoid and I still worry it's all a Rovian tactic to lull liberals into a false sense of security... I can't get used to the dumb RNC.

Michael Steele: Iconoclast or Dumbass?

Michael Steele is saying some crazy s*** these days. He's either self-satirizing in a subtle bid to reach hipster intellectuals. Or he's a dumbass. Because it's hard to tell either way, he's like the human equivalent of 'Dancing With The Stars'. Or Sarah Palin.

Referring to the healthcare vote, Steele recently asked "Can we all get in a room and have a Rodney King moment..?" Is he suggesting the Senate be beaten within an inch of their lives by the LAPD? Probably not what he had in mind. But if it was, he'd get my vote.

Then on Wednesday, after a Fox anchor said the health care reform train has "already left the station," Steele said "Well, I'm the cow on the tracks. You're gonna have to stop that train to get this cow off the track to move forward."

As Julie Farby says "Apparently, Mr. Steele is unschooled in the storied history of train/cow confrontations." Or is he just going over our heads?