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What Keeps Me Up At Night

I can name a few things:

It seems like every day now I hear something new that seems to exceed my expectations when it comes to extreme positions, an uninformed position on an issue, or just plan political stupidity. Today it was Barack Obama saying this to a group in San Francisco:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

(Emphasis mine, and everyone else’s in the blogosphere as well). This appears to be yet another kiss of death… but it won’t be. It may give Clinton a win in Pennsylvania, and will likely ensure that there is a major battle at the Democratic Convention (which will be good for Republicans), but it will not be the end of Obama’s campaign or career.

If I said anything like that in the workplace, I would probably get a solid reprimand. If a leader in my company said it, she would probably be forced to resign. In politics, you pretty much have to commit a felony before anyone tries to push you out the door. Stupid is accepted as part of the landscape.

I hate quoting this film, but: “Stupid is as stupid does”. I mean, really, you’d think that when someone says something, they might actually mean it. Slips of the tongue aside, comments like this are either stupid are scary, but almost always the true intent of the speaker. To some extent, I suspect we are being conditioned to accept a mindset that deviates dramatically from the kind of citizenship, patriotism, the kind of shining leadership we should expect from a US Senator let alone a President of the United States.

It’s really not the fact that Obama says so many incredible things, or behaves in such an unpatriotic manner (disrespecting the Flag [1], for instance, or planning to break our military powerbase [2]). It’s not the fact that Clinton can lie [3] and cheat without blinking an eye. Frankly, I’m mostly concerned about the issues, but if your President is so stupid as to do and say the things these two have done, what’s going to happen when they start working with world leaders, and will their reputations already precede them? Can you really trust them to have the country’s best interest at heart?

But what really scares me the most is that so many people are willing to stand up and defend these two people as if everything they did and said is okay or not worth worrying about. It seems like we have a country made up largely of zombies willing to toss their own children off a cliff if it gets them the one little thing they want. Does anyone really think for themselves any longer? Can anyone think beyond themselves and beyond the short term?

We all need to pay attention to what’s going on and think! Don’t make decisions based on the 30 second sound bites. Go to the candidate’s web sites and read what they are saying. Ask questions. Check out the information. Don’t trust statistics… check them out!

Even though The Conservative Reader presses a conservative message, we aren’t here to tell you how to think. Our mission is encourage you to think, give you ideas, and provide a forum for discussion. Let’s think this through together!

Update: Missed giving credit to Sister Toldjah [4] and Ben Smith [5] on the Obama quote. Fixed list.