The mindless senator

When it comes to intelligence and stupidity, I have been fairly open that I see things differently than most people. You can even find part of this in my list of Defining Beliefs. Nothing subjective in nature can be measured in a truly accurate and objective manner. There is no right and wrong in subjectivity, only personal opinions.

When it comes to my personal opinions about intelligence, I view mental process as the single most important factor. There are a lot of stupid things that politicians say, but there might be something even worse. What if a politician never contributes a thought?

For years, I have complained about living in the most mindless era in the history of humanity. I frequently tie this to our schooling system because our schools promote a culture of fear. People fear being wrong so much that they defer to authoritarian figures that they trust, even if they are not truly trustworthy. To make matters worse, this is not isolated to factual content. Our schools are training citizens to defer to others to dictate beliefs, thoughts, and opinions.

When we discuss stupidity in politics, we are generally discussing people who turn to their political parties to tell them what to think. If they are missing anything, they look for flimsy excuses to fill in the holes. Their thoughts are poorly thought out, and they can frequently be defeated with nothing but common sense. They at least have to come up with something stupid to say, but there's almost no thought beyond that. Some politicians don’t say those stupid things because they are incapable of even that miniscule thought required to come up with something stupid.

This raises an interesting question. Who is stupider, someone whose thought process is almost non-existent, or someone whose thought process is completely non-existent? The former might appear stupider because they say stupider things, but I would argue that the latter is even worse.

As a Washingtonian, I have observed a senator, Party Murray, serve for over three decades without contributing a single thought. She had made a career out of being a mindless pawn of the Democratic party. She originally campaigned on proving critics wrong when they insisted she couldn't make a difference but has clearly proven her critics right.

Admittedly, I am a little biased on this one. Regardless, I do think that Patty Murray should be a part of the discussions when we are debating over who the dumbest members of Congress are. There might be some who say stupider things, but that's less of a risk when you are only capable of parroting off talking points that your party feeds to you. By the way, that doesn't mean that I don't view some of these parroted talking points as downright moronic. They're just a little better vetted.