Happiness is Never Admitting You're Wrong
Palin, Bachmann Premier New Style
Of Good Old American Exceptionalism
by Dan Ehrlich



It has become apparent during the past two years the dumbing down of America has infected the political arena with candidates ignorant of basic American history. But even more alarming some of these people would rather attempt to prove the correctness of their errors than admit to being wrong…in essence rewriting history for their own vanity.

The two most prominent cases in this new presidential campaign are Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin…both darlings of the right, and post baby boomer kids…still young enough to have missed out of the old style education they advocate.

Palin, now famously claimed Paul Revere’s fabled ride was actually an event to warn the British that the colonist were not going to give up their guns. In fact his ride’s main purpose was to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that the British were marching to arrest them.

Now, Bachmann, who has declared herself a presidential candidate, came out with something just as absurd as Palin’s statement by saying our founding fathers abolished slavery when everyone should have known that many signatories of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners.

When Palin was confronted with her error she fumbled around trying to justify it, right up to having supporters attempting to alter the Wikipedia listing for Revere’s ride. And Bachmann also refused to admit she was in error. She may not have known who are founding fathers were. Abe Lincoln wasn’t one of them,

As minor as these things seem, they can be seen as indicative of the shape of basic grade school education that has deteriorated so much supposedly intelligent people who aspire to high public office can’t correctly answer that old Groucho Marx staple question: Who was buried in Grant’s tomb?

Under our Constitution while native-born citizenship in a prime qualification to be President, there are no intelligence criteria. Maybe it’s time for this to change. As more and more dumbed down Americans enter the political arena the chance of actually having a popular, yet stupid candidate, win and election becomes more probable. I mean I wouldn’t call GW Bush an academic powerhouse.

The root of the problem is an educational system that doesn’t teach US history as thorough as in days of old. This coupled with the fun and games aspect that dominates school for many kids into their teens, and the end products can be students who don’t know about Paul Revere’s ride and when slavery ended.

The Tea Party gang is supposed to be composed of people with a love of traditional Americana. Yet, how many of them actually know where their name originated and the circumstances surrounding it? More than likely a variety of explanations would surface from people willing to defend their answers to the end.

On the other side of the coin, the liberal attempt to sanitize our history so as to be inoffensive to anyone in the patchwork demography of America threatens to dumb down the population even more, with a distorted PC view of the country and life.

The latest is attempts at editing Huckleberry Finn to eliminate Nigger which is used liberally in the book simply because that’s how people talked in those days. But, since the N word has been banned from the slightest utterance (rap songs get a pass as long as they’re sung by Black rappers), our history then is effectively rewritten.

The Palins and Bachmanns of America probably began appearing after multiple choice school exams took hold of classrooms. Students no longer had to think or even study, if they didn’t want to…They just had to tick boxes and hope some would be correct ticks. The end result has been a sort of brain atrophy caused by not being forced to use that organ.

This has filtered right through society. Americans, who once thought of themselves as being exceptional, are now openly stupid and proud of it.

A telling example can be found on  most college and university job sites where well thought out hard copies of employment applications for everything from janitorial positions to academic department heads are no longer accepted. They have been replaced by computer formatted employment forms that keep verbiage to a minimum and must be submitted via the web.

The latest example of a no-brainer was the acquittal of Casey Anthony in the murder of her daughter. After all the evidence against her for being less than a model mother, the jury couldn’t even find her guilty of child neglect or endangerment. I mean, even her lawyer admitted she was a liar.

I have to agree with former DA Marcia Clark that this verdict was a bigger travesty of justice than the OJ Simpson murder trial. Because this time there was testimony and evidence about her complicity in the death of her daughter. Yet, the Jury was incapable of finding her guilty of any serious crime.

This denied any justice for the murdered child and made a further mockery of our legal system. And at the root was the inability of ordinary Americans, raised and brainwashed by TV dramas such as Law and Order,  to muster enough intelligence and common sense from those atrophied brains and render some verdict that held this hot little babe responsible.

Oh, and now the frosting on top of the cake in our decadent Romanesque society will be Anthony making a fortune out of this crime from book deals and TV appearances to even movies of one kind or another.

If you ad all these aspects, the dumbing down of the population, unreality TV, murder trial coverage by Entertainment Hype Tonight, a fractured justice system, a declining economy, being engaged in pointless foreign wars that sap our national wealth while making a few wealthier and politicians who can’t tell you what America’s first charter was called, there’s a picture of a nation cruising on auto pilot not realizing the fuel is almost gone.

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