Drivel, hate and other annoyances

Thanks to a pulled muscle in my shoulder, I am home while my husband and son are tubing on a small mountain/hill/slope. I gave the child a tube of protective skin balm, which I am guessing will be left in the car, and the husband is not wearing winter boots. I'm getting ready to bake blueberry muffins and a loaf of banana bread, but I read something interesting and wanted to muse about it on the blog.

A recent study posits that intelligence has a direct link to racism and conservatism. In other words, if you're stupid, you're a conservative bigot. I would like to suggest we replace the word "stupid" with the word "ignorant." I know many conservatives who aren't stupid, but they are ignorant. It's not the same thing. Ignorance has to do with lack of knowledge, stupidity has to do with a fundamental lack of intelligence.

If little Johnny gets an F on a Social Studies test because his grandfather is a member of the White Aryan Race movement and is teaching Johnny about mud people, coons, spics, etc., odds are, Johnny will suck at ANY test that contains information different from what he is learning at home. That's ignorance. That's the current GOP, version 2.0.

There are stupid people everywhere, but ignorance, many times, is a choice. People choose not to learn the truth and get their news from Fox or Alex Jones or Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. All of whom, by the way, are incredibly ignorant people. Ron Paul supporters strike me as incredibly ignorant people, both in their blind allegiance to Ron Paul and their immediate lashing out at anyone who dares to question the belief system of Paul.

Now, there are ignorant liberals. The NDAA is a perfect example of this. A spammer edited a video in which Carl Levin was speaking and BAM, President Obama is the second GW Bush, he's evil incarnate, no one should vote, we need to primary him. And when the truth was revealed by many, MANY writers, bloggers and at least one journalist (maybe just the one), liberals still believed Glenn Greenwald over the truth. Ignorance.

We no longer have journalists, for the most part, we have pundits, both on the left and the right. Martin Bashir is a journalist, and I have the utmost respect for him. It could just be the accent, though. He has lovely eyes, he really sorry, what? Oh. Cenk Uygur is one of the few pundits on the "left" I ignore. He spearheaded the NDAA bullshit, and never apologized for his misinformation. He is a supporter of Ron Paul, and was for a long time, a Republican. I also ignore Michael Moore, and unfortunately, Keith Olbermann. KO revealed that he has never voted, and I thought my head would explode. If you don't vote, you have no say in anything, in my opinion.

The pundits I ignore on the right comprise too vast a list to post here, but trust me, they number in the hundreds. I should say that the one person on the right who really makes my skin crawl is Sean Hannity. He's a smarmy snake oil salesman, filled with hate and racism. Here's a guy who was friends with Hal Turner (Google him) and lied about it. When it became obvious that Hannity would have to address the Turner issue, he said he didn't really know him, Hannity had only had him on his radio program. Hal Turner was truly surprised by Sean Hannity's statement and said so from prison. Yes, prison. He was there for trying to solicit a hit on a federal judge.

Do I think Sean Hannity is stupid? Nope. I think he's ignorant, and like the rest of the right, has placed a big old flag on top of Ignorant Mountain and said "We claim this mountain in the name of America." We are becoming an increasingly ignorant nation. We get our news from unsubstantiated sources, we only read the headlines of articles and base our comments on that headline, we refuse to see the good that President Obama has accomplished because where's the fun in that? Watching the president succeed is a lot less exciting than lying and leading people to believe he is actually failing and will lose this election to one of the true ignoramuses running for the Republican nomination. And so, people on the left and the right compose meaningless drivel about how much of a failure President Obama is, and we should all just stop voting or vote for Ron Paul.

I was "unfriended" today by a Facebook acquaintance who berated me for sharing a new website created by two friends of mine. This website, Hate Site Central, strives to shine a light on the hate and racism coming out of the right, and also highlights the fight against this hate. The acquaintance was miffed because it seemed that the website focused on the hate without promoting the good things we do. I guess she meant to combat the hatred on the right, but she didn't make that clear. I've been shining a light into this cesspool for over a year, and no one ever accused me of not highlighting the battle against racism and hatred. In fact, simply by bringing it to the forefront, we're battling it. Evil lurks in the darkness, but dies in the light of truth. (I wrote that. Not bad, huh?)

Anyway, time to bake. I'm a guest on The Mad Women of Politics Anonymous this evening. [http://www.blogtalkradio.com/forwardblitz/2012/01/09/the-mad-women-of-politics-anonymous], 6-8 CST. Tune in, I sound like a Midwestern Smurf.

© Erin Nanasi 2012