Article: The Emperor is Stupid

There is no bundle of nonsense so gallingly dumb that it cannot be dressed up in the guise of conservative religion and paraded unchallenged through the mainstream gauntlet of the press.

If you say something stupid in general, the press will fact-check you on it. Wrap up that same stupidity in the silvery strings of Fundie Jesus and suddenly it may not be challenged. Left can be right ... up can be down ... any rank stupidity must be embraced without question as the sacred and veritable truth thus revealed. Right-wingers are "pro-family-values" Sure, you betcha. Deny that the concepts of small government and Bush-league spying completely contradict each other? Lord, make a way.

And the little man behind the GOP curtain goes right on gaming the system. This time the Emperor isn't pretending he's clothed -- this time we're all pretending he's not dumb.

Of course, the real "Emperors" in all of this aren't stupid at all. They've tried to use the blindly religious and their money-making apparatus to take over the country. They played on the gullibility of people who are bred to think uncritically and rewarded with approval for doing so. The real Emperors use the religious mechanism to make their Puppet Emperors uncritically embrace the whole range of inane neocon beliefs. The whole thus becomes a self-sustaining chronic enabling system in order that the Puppet Emperors may persist in their shared delusion and so that the real "Emperors" may go on pulling their strings.

The dangerous thing is that Pinnochio's has now gone rogue.

Perhaps dimly perceiving he's been used, the wooden guy aims to be a real little kid. He wants to be the real Emperor this time. Their latest candidate for the job is a woman so ignorant that she believes in the literal truth of the Biblical story of creation. She knocks elbows with witch doctors who support her in the delusion that all she has to do is whisper the magical words "lord, make a way" and, bibbitybobbityboo, impossible things will occur. This is now the sole "base" of the Republican party. People who actually believe in a happy world with friendly bluebirds and singing and dancing mice.

Further, many of them expect to be "beamed up" in what they call the Rapture (and what I call the First Cut) to some five-star resort made of diaphanous angel hair.

We need to start calling these people on their delusions. We need to start stating firmly: Intelligent people don't believe we roamed the earth with dinosaurs. It's not possible to combine true education and fundamentalist right-wing Biblical beliefs -- one or the other has to give. Until we deal with the idiocy machine that is modern fundamentalist religion, we'll never solve any of our nation's problems.

Why didn't Katie Couric or Matt Lauer or someone else reach out to Mrs. Palin and say, "Sarah, face it, you're too dumb to know you're not smart enough to be Vice President."

The problem is she's too dumb to know how dumb she really is. It's at this stage of conscious ignorance that true believers want to mow down the sinners (aka those who disagree with them -- see also terrorist sympathizers, Democrats, etc.) and vanquish the unbelievers (read that: the educated or informed). To borrow another regal allegory, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is not king. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is given a blindfold and a cigarette at dawn.

We'd better keep both our eyes operative and open or we'll have a road filled with naked emperors ahead without the ability to see any of them.

Written by Melody in semi-silly mode fully smart enough to know she's not smart enough to be Vice President ... and that she has woefully mixed any number of metaphors along the way.