John Kerry: Bitterly Clinging to the Right to Be Stupid

by Eileen | 8:23 pm, February 26, 2013 | Comments Off

John Kerry has assured the Germans that Americans have the right to be stupid.  Read into that what you will.  It certainly continues a tradition of wannabe statesmen making asses of themselves to Berliners.

To wit, Kennedy’s moronic ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ comment.  This was profoundly stupid (as was his right) not because the President may, or may not, have identified himself as a jelly filled doughnut, but because of the context in which he made that statement.  The Berlin Wall, truly the architecture of evil, was going up around him and instead of condemning the assault on humanity, Mr. Camelot was content to burble on about some mushy ideal of global brotherhood and such.

It took Reagan to point out the obvious – that there was no justification for Der Mauer.  John Kerry, in contrast, rhapsodized about his youthful excursion into East Germany as if it were some anthropological jaunt, pure fun with any moral aspect or lesson. I’m only surprised he didn’t opt to stay in the DDR.  Hell, it’s entirely possible the Stasi tossed him out for being too far left.  Anyway…

In full, Kerry’s diplomatic brilliance went:

In America, you have a right to be stupid, if you want to be.  And you have a right to be disconnected to somebody else if you want to be. And we tolerate that – we somehow make it through that.

Believe me, boy, every citizen in America knows all about abiding and surviving the stupidity of others, the others being nearly every elected official we have.

I think that what he reads as ‘stupid’ is actually the rational ignorance of people who have little hope of impacting the policies of their own nation, in no small part owing to the machinations of the John Kerry’s of the world.  To assume that being ‘disconnected’ from others is somehow connected to stupidity is…well…stupid.  And vile.

A liberal takes it as a self-evident truth that we all get to choose with whom we associate and that we ‘disconnect’ from others for what are often very good reasons.  Only a hardcore collectivist could peacock about and expect praise for the mere act of not forcing people to connect.  Knowing the sort of man Kerry is, I have no doubt he truly is astonished to notice that society manages to keep going in spite of a lack of coerced fraternization.

Perhaps he can nominate himself for an award for having come to this realization.  What would actually be a shock would be John Kerry  grasping that he epitomizes the practice of pursuing isolation from the vast majority of others.  He talks, but the only meaning in his comments lies in everything he doesn’t get and doesn’t say.

Our newest Secretary of State has inadvertently revealed a great truth about America’s leadership class.  The ‘right to be stupid’ has been reinterpreted as the ‘right to say asinine things in a position of power and then pretend there are no repercussions for that’.  Let’s survey the last few days.

Joe Salazar, who doesn’t think the little women of America are smart enough to know when they’re being threatened, certainly merits attention here.  The most charitable reading anyone can give him is that he wasn’t thinking.  That’s the kind assessment.  As best, he’s stupid.  At worst, he would honestly prefer higher rape incidence to allowing citizens to arm themselves.  Speaking of the right to stupidity, the citizens of Colorado sent this man to the legislature with almost ten points between him and his opponent in the general election.

Ah, but Joe is small-time and will likely stay that way.  Those who control advancement within the Democratic party certainly agree with him on disarming citizens regardless of the human costs, but they can’t tolerate a man so impossibly stupid that he actually says as much.

This is something of an irony, as some of the most fully stupid speakers in American politics are already at the top.  I suppose the key to success is to moderate yourself and have friends in the media.  Then, after you’ve made it, the stupid can come out.

Kerry and the right to stupid was the first thing I saw when I climbed out of my coffin this morning, cursed the sun, and booted up the laptop.  And then I saw the comments made by his nominal employer, Barry, and Barry’s wife, the reliably stupid Shelly-Belly.  These two are a special kind of stupid.  They’re educated and can score impressively enough on the sort of standardized tests they are so fond of denouncing.  By any possible metric, they’ve made it in life.  The former has won his last election and now has, to resurrect last year’s meme, more flexibility in what he says and does.  The latter is not actually appointed or elected to anything, so the most anyone can do is criticize her abuse of a position that ought to be apolitical.

They’re arrogant, they don’t need (or don’t think they need) to please anyone, and they float through life certain they know everything and surrounded by sycophants who will reinforce that delusion.  Of such cossetting and isolation is all big government made.

Today alone, POTUS came out with a soaring oratorical tribute to hypocrisy and a near-total lack of introspection:

You know, the one thing about being president is, after four years, you get pretty humble. You’d think maybe you wouldn’t but actually you become more humble–you realize what you don’t know.

You realize all the mistakes you made. But you also realize you can’t do things by yourself. That’s not how our system works. You’ve got to have the help and the goodwill of Congress, and what that means is you’ve got to make sure that constituents of members of Congress are putting some pressure on them, making sure they’re doing the right thing.

Well, well, well…on the surface, Obama is not humble, let alone more humble than he once was.  He has yet to admit, certainly not publicly and probably not even to himself, that there is anything he’s wrong about, any mistake he made, or anything he needed to learn.  Of course, that’s the window dressing.  That garbage was merely the run up to yet another criticism of a Congress that is acting as a Constitutionally mandated check on the Executive rather than the mindless flunky to which Barry feels so deeply entitled.

Exploring Dear Leader’s thoughts, we see a worrying depiction of the citizens (miserable pests that they are) as being useful only to hound Congress into giving in to the President.  Our job is to “[make] sure [Congress’ does the right thing”?  I must have missed the debate where we all decided that Barack Obama alone knows the right course in all matters and that it only remains to cudgel the voters into cudgeling Congress into rubber stamping Barry and all his right-ness.

That bit about realizing you can’t do things on your own wasn’t an honest admission that society relies on cooperation and division on labor, but a child wailing that he has no choice but to play games and compromise with others.  He’s not telling us he’s learned about the need to work with others.  He’s bitching that things are that way.

His wife was also in her usual form – haranguing and patronizing, dispensing her little shards of wisdom, blissfully unencumbered by facts or reflection.  On a softball interview on ABC, the First Lady dragged a murdered child out of her fresh grave in order to assault the Second Amendment, again.

Jesus Christ, girlfriend.  No one elected you to do anything.  Go read to children.  If you want to shape policy, why not do a little work and win office on your own.  Then you can be legally accountable to the people whose lives you’re screwing up.

Her explanation of why 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton was cut down is that, “some kids had some automatic weapons they didn’t need.”  Lovely, except that Miss Pendleton’s murderer used a handgun.  (ABC edited the First Lady’s comments before broadcast to remove the factual error, something the network swears it did only for time constraints.)

There’s something to be pulled out of all this.  With all four people I’ve mentioned, all far-left social engineers who are, to put it charitably, contemptuous of other people, there’s massive disdain for the very representative process that allows the ‘little people’ a say in their own governance.

Joe Salazar doesn’t want people making their own choices about carrying a firearm and he doesn’t trust people to make a correct assessment of a situation and then react appropriately.

Barack Obama can’t stand the fact that people want a say in the rules that bind them and chafes at his inability to get 310 million Americans to acquiesce to him in all things.

Michelle Obama is so damn to giddy to see Americans disarmed that getting a readily verifiable fact correct becomes superfluous.

And John Kerry is not only certain we’re all stupid, he wants to make sure we all know he tolerates us.

One gets the sense that it’s not the average voter who’s stupid.  One also senses the ruling class very much wishes we were.

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