The toxic minority

Let's face it.

Somewhere between 25 and 36% of the voting age American public are complete morons.

These are people who cannot think critically, whose pig-brained (and I genuinely apologize to all intelligent members of the genus Porcus) decision-making capabilities are molded exclusively by the latest, loudest, red-faced truth-defiling instrument of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, who willfully take for granted the past largess of the Federal government's experiments towards a civil society (and believe me, we have a long way to go), who often fail to even recognize that such inventions as social security and medicare are in fact government programs, whose grasp of the world stage ends five yards from their front door (or at best, the exit doors of their local shopping mall). These are the people who, right to the bitter end of November 4, 2008 insisted that history would redeem the administration of George W. Bush and his Svengali, Richard B. Cheney.

If the current voting age population of the United States is somewhere around 150 million, that means that 37.5-54 million of our fellow citizens have their heads situated firmly and irrevocably up their colons. That is no small number of pinheads. But they are still a minority. Now, breathing such fecund air does little for such already oxygen-starved brains. And yet, somehow, it is this sputtering minority that seems to rule the debate, at least within the strangled hallways of the mainstream media (what the wingnuts call the "liberal" media), when it comes to reforming the health insurance industry, shifting our energy paradigm to one much less reliant on fossil fuels, climate change, or literally any attempt at reform by our current moderate Democratic president. The reasons for this are manifold, intertwined, but not really very complex.

For one, spewing "tea-baggers" make for better press than quiet, reasoned, proponents of liberal causes. (Aside: "tea-bagger" has an interesting definition among the urban young that has nothing to do with politics - well, maybe sexual politics. Look it up. Personally, I feel like that's what's being done to me when I see some gonad-driven wingnut screaming at my congressional representative).

For two, the media is, for the most part, controlled by large corporations who, in case you haven't figured it out, are the main architects of "public" policy in America today (and times past, too). The status quo serves them very well, and projecting image after image of red-faced Sarah Palin facilitators is a bulwark against any reform that may suit them less.

And for three, the rest of us, by our conspiracy of silence, enable them.