Dumb and Dumbererer

When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. - Mitt Romney, Republican nominee for President, speaking at a Beverly Hills fundraiser which nevertheless brought in $6 million.

Left: "regular" Mitt. Right: Mitt speaking in "bronzeface"
at a Univision Town Hall meeting on Hispanic issues

So it's come to this. I knew that Mitt Romney was not the kind of man I would ever want to meet. I knew his distorted views of the world were pretty much anathema to my own. I knew he was the "best" of a hilariously bad crop of candidates who were vying for the Republican Presidential nomination this year. But I had no idea that he was so pathologically, nearly debilitatingly stupid. I know our own mayor, Rob Ford, is that stupid, but he has no real power and never will get the chance to have a profound impact on the lives of millions. But this is a far more serious situation: Mitt Romney has a chance -- albeit one that is, fortunately, slipping away almost by the hour -- of being President of the United States. And he is every bit as stupid as Rob Ford. If you don't believe me, go back and read that quote again while imagining it was RoFo who issued that staggeringly ignorant comment. It's not a very difficult thing to imagine, is it? It's not enough that Mittens cannot seem to grasp why being able to open a window on a vehicle moving at near sonic speeds is not a very good thing; he's not even capable of understanding how fire itself works. Here's a hint: it thrives on oxygen.

Romney campaign gaffes

If this man were ever to be handed the keys to the Oval Office, the "Culture of Dumb" (as I call it) that we live in today will undoubtedly have reached its zenith. Admittedly, I have paid almost zero attention to the Republican debates, nomination process, convention, or really anything whatsoever to do with that party that is so right wing it makes Rocket Richard look like a goalie. (Hockey player. He was kind of a big deal.) However, I can't imagine that Romney was this publicly dumb before he earned the nomination because even my limited exposure to all things GOP would have certainly brought his stupidity to light. Now that he's settled in for the stretch drive, though, he seems to have wriggled out of the control of his handlers. He's shown up in "bronzeface" for a Univision interview; he's been caught on tape saying his quest for the White House would be easier if he was a "Latino"; and, of course, the big "oops" came when he said on that very same recording that "my job is not to worry about" the 47% of Americans who depend on the Government for such outrageous things as food, clothing and health care. I guess if I had really been paying attention I would have put more stock into the three spelling mistakes his campaign crew made in less than a week back in June, but good help is so hard to find these days. Besides, as Romney pollster Neil Newhouse declared last month, "We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers." Oh, ok. I guess that's plain enough. They're just going to lie and fabricate numbers out of thin air (such as Paul Ryan's breathtaking claim of running a marathon in "under three hours"). It shouldn't matter to anyone else because for a person to notice the lies and made-up statistics they would have to be "educated". And we all know that being educated is "elitist".

Not entirely accurate, but this
poster sums up the rage on Twitter

I live in a nation that is suffering through similar struggles with stupidity and entitlement issues, such as the recent "Wente-gate"; the defending of the indefensible by veteran journalists such as Terence Corcoran who really should know better; the mayor of our biggest city meddling in Toronto's citizen board appointment procedures (asking that the part where we "encourage" diverse applicants to apply be stricken from the ad copy); the monumentally disturbing presentation of Bill 312, which was voted down but still received 91 "yea" votes out of 294 total, including -- appallingly -- the Minister for the Status of Women, Rona Ambrose; and the recent post by the increasingly senile and feeble-minded Peter Worthington that the rampant criticism of Yunel Escobar -- which even I lamented in my blog post -- was somehow similar to how the Holocaust was started. Seriously. He really said that. Up here, in the Great White North, it feels like the small-minded people -- in every possible sense of the word -- we've elected to run things or given unearned tenure while we are busy playing with our phones are trying to drag our nation back in time to somewhere in the 1950s. With the rise of the Tea Party, though, it seems to me that the Republican party won't be happy until they've dragged the USA back to the time of the Inquisition.


But all of that pales in comparison to this one, horrifying fact that I mentioned in passing in the accreditation of my opening quote: the banquet where Romney declared he has no idea why jet airplane windows cannot be opened raised six million dollars for his campaign. After they heard him make that remark.

Sometimes there just ain't no helping people.