The War on Stupidity

Pat Robertson calls for the assassination of Hugo Chavez. A baby dies of herpes in New York because an Orthodox rabbi refuses to abandon the 5,000-year-old practice of sucking the blood out of a baby’s penis after circumcision, a practice which inevitably communicates herpes from the sucker to the suckee. And extremist Muslims are still plotting murderous attacks within our own borders.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

The director of the FDA's office of women's health quits over the politicization of the morning-after pill. Pharmacists are refusing to fill prescriptions based on religion.

Don't even get me started on "intelligent design."

And that's just religion.

It's also time for a renewed focus on race and class. Even David Brooks can see what's really going on in New Orleans. Some hot-headed racists, as evidenced by their stomach-turning tirades on the Times-Picayune discussion boards, can't. Are there people down there freeloading, acting like animals? Yes. Are there people in Hampden doing the same thing? Yes.

Here's where the racists bring out statistics. "Look," they say, holding up a statistic about welfare or crime, "it's more prevalent among blacks." But what is the hypothesis that requires that kind of statistic? That blacks are naturally inferior? You'll have to do better than one measly statistic.

Oh, you have an entire book, you say? Sorry, that won't do.

Time to launch an assault that I and my cabal at the Project for a New American Mentality have been planning since 1997: a War on Stupidity, (aka, The Global Struggle Against Unrepentant Philistinism). We won't need a war on drugs, terrorism, or any other inanimate objects or abstract nouns once we win this one.

Whew.

Someone get me a coffee.

Update: Weldon Berger is discussing this, too. Link via Eschaton.