Blink and Miss a Shooting Star
During a lunchtime cyber-stroll I happened across Watching the Planet, and saw a piece from July 6th concerning a sudden, Internet phenom.
A pro-lifer named Pete read an article in the satirical paper The Onion, believed it, made it the subject of an anti-abortion post, and upon getting a huge number of hits and comments tried to pretend he knew it was a joke piece all along.
Be sure to check out the Wikipedia entry before his petitioning to have it deleted works.
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Comments
But I've realized, thinking about it, that it's not necessarily stupidity that sets this particular conservative in particular, and conservatives in general, apart from liberals.
It's sense of humor.
This guy simply has none.
And, in general, it seems to me that over on the left, we tend to have much better developed senses of humor than they have on the right.
We often wonder how people could seriously vote for Bush... TWICE. I think that's the only way you CAN vote for Bush. If you have any kind of sense of humor at all, you have to realize what a colossal joke the whole idea of him being in charge of ANYthing is, and once you see that, well, you're not going to vote for him.
Maybe we shouldn't test potential voters for intelligence. Maybe we should just let them watch some Monty Python. If they don't laugh, they don't get to vote.
We could weed down further by letting those who get by the first test watch some Benny Hill (or, I suppose, ten minutes of any CBS sitcom). Anyone who laughs at that doesn't get to vote, either.
Hey, with our current system, nearly any change has to be for the better, right?
And, as you note, he doesn't appear to have much of a sense of humor. There's something he should pray for.
Always a tough call, trying to determine where the bar should be for a voting shibboleth beyond something in the area of a basic civics test. We've seen some make their case for having someone solve a quadratic equation in order to vote, some would pose problems in logic as a fine basis, I'm sure others would call for either a degree or a term of government service as the criteria, while others will insist on memorized facts (similar to what's encountered in a citizenship test), and I suppose in the end I'd go with the latter, as the most realistic. At least it would give some impression that the people might know what the offices they're voting for are actually responsible for.