Canada: The Northernmost State

About a month ago I penned a little rant about "independent voters," arguing as I always do that "independent" is just a functional euphemism for "low-information" (i.e., "bog stupid"). The cause of that rant was a poll asking Mississippi voters for whom they would vote today if they had the choice: Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis? Lincoln was the clear winner among both Democrats and Republicans, but self-identified "Independents" were split evenly at 44% each.

I suggested that this was only further evidence that people who self-identify as "independent" are really just so damned ignorant that they don't even know who either Lincoln or Davis were. In an attempt to bolster my claim that there are Americans alive today who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was, I pointed out that "[t]hese are people who think Canada is the northernmost state."

Well . . . lest anybody think I exaggerate the depth of ignorance that exists in the simple American electorate, let's just take a gander at how the Iowa Republican caucuses are wrapping up. Here is Texas Governor Rick Perry explaining to Iowans why we should be eager to get our hands on Canada's tar sands oil:

"Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don't have to buy from a foreign source," Mr. Perry said in Clarinda, earning a round of enthusiastic applause.

Later, the audience reacted again to Mr. Perry's assertion that buying so much energy from foreign countries is "not good policy, it's not good politics and frankly it's un-American." (emphasis added)

And you thought I was exaggerating last month about how bog stupid Americans can be? What cracks me up about all this is not just that Perry just naturally considers Canada's oil to be part of the United States' domestic production, but that when he made these ridiculous statements his Republican audience burst into "enthusiastic applause." Apparently, the sheer ridiculousness of claiming Canada's oil as our own escaped them all.

Lord, Lord . . . give me the strength tomorrow night to drink enough to expunge all of 2011 from my head, and to steel me to endure the year to come.

Did Karl Rove Find an Acorn?

Even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then.

--traditional saying

Remember Karl Rove’s “inevitability strategy”?

It’s well-known that Karl Rove believes that swing voters like to vote for the winner.  Therefore, one of the central political strategies for Bush has been to create an “aura of inevitability” that, theoretically, will bring people to his side.  If everyone believes you’re a political juggernaut, the theory goes, then you will become a political juggernaut. (emphasis added)

Rove believes so completely in this strategy that when Bush II was running against Al Gore in 2000 “[t]o demonstrate his confidence, Mr. Bush traveled at the end of the campaign to California and New Jersey, states firmly in Democratic hands.”  The strategic thinking seemed to be that having Bush campaign in states everyone knew he couldn’t win signaled to undecided voters how confident Bush was that he’d take the swing states he actually needed.  To Rove, this “signaling” was more important than any substantive campaigning in the last few days might be.

Now, I’ve never been a big believer in the “Karl Rove is a political genius” school of thought.  Karl Rove’s success has always seemed to me to stem mostly from his sheer unwillingness to abide by any sense of morality or decency if doing so might blunt his candidate’s chance to win an election.  His readiness to simply forsake all previously accepted limitations on what constitutes appropriate campaign conduct amounts to nothing more than a breaking of the (unwritten) rules that - prior to Rove’s appearance - had always been understood to govern the contest.  Put another way, Rove wins elections by cheating.  This doesn’t make him a genius, it makes him an asshole.

But yesterday, whilst searching for something else entirely, I came across information that indicates ol’ Rover might actually be on to something with his “inevitability strategy.”  It turns out that, when it comes to elections anyway, it might actually be possible for a political campaign to “create [its] own reality."

The Friedman Files: Case File No. 1

Thomas Friedman is widely lampooned for his tendency to take an errant comment spposedly made by a taxi driver in some far-flung foreign city Friedman happens to be visiting, and extrapolating from that comment some supposedly deep understanding of the current state of the world.

I may be starting a semi-regular series of posts modeled on The Moustache of Understanding's own modus operandi. Hence, "the Friedman Files." The only difference between the two of us is that I can vouch with certainty that the conversations related herein did, in fact, occur and - unlike The Moustache - I understand that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data." In other words, while I may use some specific incident to make a larger point, I'm just some random blogger - not a Pulitzer prize winning columnist owning prime real estate over at The New York Times - and so unlike Friedman I have no problem acknowledging right up front that anything contained in these Files is just me spewing conjecture off the top of my head.

With these caveats in mind, on to File No. 1: The Case of the Low Information Bartendress.