To me, 2011 offered a buffet of publicly expressed stupidity, perpetuated by a broad swatch of races, genders, and ideological factions. Here are a few gems.
Starting close to home, Governor Paul LePage was a veritable fountain of stupidity in actions and words, but I'm just going to settle on his decision to remove murals depicting labor-related historical scenes and themes from the office of the Maine Department of Labor, on the basis that it was anti-business, and claiming that he did so because of a single letter of complaint. Paulie-boy, it's the Department of L-A-B-O-R. You know, the one focused on workers. The department that business moguls go to is called the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development. If there were murals of the proletariat there, LePage might have had a point.
But I don't want to be pegged as leftist or unfair, so let's go straight to the top and waggle a finger at President Barack Obama, for continuing to try to negotiate fairly and intellectually with the Republicans this year when it was clear from earlier in his presidency that they'd vote against him in Congress even if he put forth a bill asking for a Ronald Reagan day, simply because they refuse to let anything move forward that he endorses. Hell, they've already complained about cap-and-trade emissions rules for air quality, which was a Republican invention, and objected to aspects of Obama's health-care reform that Republicans had earlier insisted must be part of such reform.
But getting back to right-wing nutjobs, and showing that I don't just bash the men, how about US Representative Michele Bachmann? So much to choose from, but how about this from a speech she made in Iowa in January: "But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States. . . . I think it is high time that we recognize the contribution of our forbearers who worked tirelessly — men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country." Of course, the problem with this historical fact, much like those of fellow idiot Sarah Palin, is that it's not true. The Founding Fathers never did a thing to end slavery and John Quincy Adams wasn't even one of the Founding Fathers. In fact, he was a child at that time.
Or how about Donald Trump, showing that riches don't buy you brains, when he let his hairpiece do his thinking for him and launched an investigation into the then-dying birther movement, after Barack Obama had already produced a birth certificate and people had found a newspaper birth announcement about him entering the world in Hawaii.
As an add-on to that, how stupid is a good chunk of the population for saying Obama's birth certificate was actually a "certificate of live birth" and therefore invalid as proof of citizenship? Tons of states don't call it a "birth certificate" and use similar language to Hawaii's. Guess most Americans aren't really American, eh?
In celebrity news, how about Johnny Depp, who I actually think is pretty cool, saying of photo shoots, "Well, you just feel like you're being raped somehow." Huge points for false equivalency, there, Captain Jack Sparrow. As well as belittling rape.
