At the request of The Associated Press, eight climate and biological scientists graded for scientific accuracy what a dozen top candidates said in debates, interviews and tweets, using a 0 to 100 scale. To try to eliminate possible bias, the candidates’ comments were stripped of names and given randomly generated numbers, so the professors would not know who made each statement they were grading. Also, the scientists who did the grading were chosen by professional scientific societies. And Ted Cruz winned! Or shall we say, Ted Cruz got the lowest score out of everybody running, coming in with a whopping SIX points out of 100, which would suggest he misspelled his own name on the paper, except for how the scientists didn’t know which idiot said what…. “This individual understands less about science (and climate change) than the average kindergartner,” Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University meteorology professor, wrote of Cruz’s statements. “That sort of ignorance would be dangerous in a doorman, let alone a president.”
The more I try to wrap my brain around this, the more I struggle with understanding how it could be that something with a J.D. from Harvard Law School could be so unbelievably, willfully &^%$#!@ stupid. Perhaps it’s not even that Ted Cruz is nearly as stupid as he is wedded to a narrative and the knowledge that if he changed course mid-stream, he’d be laughed out of the field of GOP Presidential moral misfits contenders. As it is, one would almost expect Cruz to begin prattling on ad nauseum, ad infinitum about birth certificates, secret Muslims, and Obamaphones.
IS he truly so stupid that he can’t grasp the very basic and easily understandable science behind global climate change? Or is it merely that his lust for power and his willingness to do and or say whatever might help him grasp the brass ring has blinded him to things like truth, facts, and reality? As if I need to answer that….
Our next President, whoever he or she might be, will need to be wise and intelligent enough to address they myriad problems we face as they are, NOT as their ideology prefers to portray them. The current circus politics atmosphere of the GOP beauty contest, to the nation’s detriment, favors demagogues over solid, intelligent, and reliable leaders. The intellectual and moral midgets vying for the GOP nomination are heavily invested in believing something is so because the prevailing narrative dictates as much.
Ted Cruz is a lawyer. Ben Carson is a neurosurgeon. Carly Fiorina is a former CEO of Hewlett Packard. These are not stupid people, yet they’re willing and able demagogues and dissemblers because that’s what the GOP Primary process requires of them. The problem, of course, is that they can’t claim to have solutions when every word that issues from their lips is dogma based on Right-wing talking points. Global climate change is a hoax because the Far Right believes it to be so, and as far as they’re concerned belief equals fact. Whether or not Ted Cruz believes the dominant narrative is beside the point; if he wants to win the GOP nomination, he must advance that narrative as if he believes it with ever fiber of his being. It’s the Big Lie- repeat a lie often enough and it will eventually become the truth.
If a Presidential candidate is willing to peddle lies and disinformation in the service of a blind lust for power, how are we to assume that he or she will be honest with us once they’re in office? If you’re a willing and facile dissembler, that’s not a switch that can be flipped to the “OFF” position after the general election. If you push (and, even worse, believe in) a provably false narrative when it comes to global climate change, you can’t credibly claim to be the most qualified candidate to sit behind the big desk in the Oval Office and lead America into the future.
Willfully stupid people make for damned poor leaders.
