(no subject)
oh man so i'm reading a book on theodore roosevelt and it's really good but also super depressing. he was a total genius. he could talk in depth about pretty much any topic and read anywhere from two to three books a day. he even wrote several that are considered seminal texts by historians. even before i started this book, working at NARA has made me think about the intelligence of the signers/founders. ben franklin and thomas jefferson were inventors and scientists as WELL as scholars of politics and literature.
in the past few decades, we've had presidents who can say so little in a whole lot of words. the state of the union is a joke, no one writes their own speeches, and addresses are delivered in such a linear, scripted way that questions that deviate from the main points are dismissed by the president with smirks and one liners and some horrible, half-thought out response. they also tend to focus on simplistic nit picking on questions they don't want to give a response to. because they rely so much on scripts and have little of their own intelligence to back up their responses, press conferences are awkward and illegitimate - full of fallacies of argument and appeals to patriotism.
i don't know why people want to elect a president who you can drink a beer with. i'd much rather have a president who can recommend a book to me. anti-intellectualism is beginning to destroy this country - a country BUILT on intellectualism and by intellectuals. and lets face it, dumb redneck fundamentalists with a 6th grade education have never given this country very much - so why should their votes and desire to have elected officials that they can understand and "relate" to be so important? they don't even know how the government works. i bet if you asked most of those all-so-important voters in the "heartland", most wouldn't even be able to name the importance or content of the constitution that this country is founded on. well, except for the second amendment, of course! they love their guns.
sorry for even writing this. i guess the fact that bush says stuff like "inn'it?" and uses a press conference as time to talk about his trip to graceland really infuriates me. why do we have a president that can't even properly pronounce words? it doesn't matter how "cute" or "down-home" anyone thinks it sounds. it's embarassing and pathetic to be living in a country led by white trash, elected by white trash.
in the past few decades, we've had presidents who can say so little in a whole lot of words. the state of the union is a joke, no one writes their own speeches, and addresses are delivered in such a linear, scripted way that questions that deviate from the main points are dismissed by the president with smirks and one liners and some horrible, half-thought out response. they also tend to focus on simplistic nit picking on questions they don't want to give a response to. because they rely so much on scripts and have little of their own intelligence to back up their responses, press conferences are awkward and illegitimate - full of fallacies of argument and appeals to patriotism.
i don't know why people want to elect a president who you can drink a beer with. i'd much rather have a president who can recommend a book to me. anti-intellectualism is beginning to destroy this country - a country BUILT on intellectualism and by intellectuals. and lets face it, dumb redneck fundamentalists with a 6th grade education have never given this country very much - so why should their votes and desire to have elected officials that they can understand and "relate" to be so important? they don't even know how the government works. i bet if you asked most of those all-so-important voters in the "heartland", most wouldn't even be able to name the importance or content of the constitution that this country is founded on. well, except for the second amendment, of course! they love their guns.
sorry for even writing this. i guess the fact that bush says stuff like "inn'it?" and uses a press conference as time to talk about his trip to graceland really infuriates me. why do we have a president that can't even properly pronounce words? it doesn't matter how "cute" or "down-home" anyone thinks it sounds. it's embarassing and pathetic to be living in a country led by white trash, elected by white trash.