Kaul: The Party Of Dumb

By Donald Kaul

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, my column pointing out that the Republican Party has become the Party of Dumb seems to have struck a nerve. Ever since it appeared, I have been getting abusive mail from outraged Republicans. Here are just a few examples:

“What a stupid jackass you are,” says Kurt B.

“It is this same ignorant liberal rant that will keep myself and millions of others like me, fighting you liberal buffoons and your corrosive rhetoric….why don’t you go and crawl back into the liberal cave from which you came and let America remain free and the human race non-tarnished by the likes of you and your ignorant cronies,” Dr. Galen from Arizona.

Mark B. weighed in with “What an oxymoron that you wrote an article claiming your apparent enemies are ‘stupid’ yet your column was void of any intelligent thoughts---surely not any synergized ideas.”

And, finally, the classic irate reader response was delivered by Jerry L. of North Carolina---“Don Kaul’s article calling all Republicans ‘dumb’ in Friday’s paper was the LAST straw. We have decided not to renew our subscription to your newspaper when the time comes.”

There were others, some obscene, some merely vulgar. Don’t feel sorry for me; I can take it. (In my defense, I wanted to provide some synergized ideas, but my synergizer was at the cleaners.) Besides, not all of the mail was abusive. Some of it was intelligent. One gentleman, a William M., wrote: “Your…article was spot-on and brutally honest!!! I have thought and felt the same as your own musings for some time, but Sarah pushed the dumbing down of the party over the top!”

And Lee S., who confesses to being a college professor, provided me this quotation from the great 19th Century English philosopher John Stuart Mill: “Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people…it is true that most stupid people are conservative.” Mill, by the way, is considered the last man to know everything.

The responses do, however, demonstrate two traits common to hard-core Republicans: 1) Their inability to accept constructive criticism and 2) their reluctance to look in the mirror and see themselves as others do. The Republican Party, after all, is the party of vituperation. It is the safe harbor of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter (The Ugh Girl). And they call my rhetoric corrosive? Compared to the venom spewed by that trio of rancid right-wingers, my “attack” on the GOP is a love poem.

And these Republicans take no responsibility for George Bush, who has made incompetence into an art form. He leaves office with the economy in a nose-dive, our international reputation in ruins and virtually nothing done about the problems we face in education, energy independence, the environment or the onrushing crisis in unfunded obligations, of which Medicare is merely the most critical.

They hardly mention Mr. Bush, their gift to us. They prefer to rail against Barack Obama and the dark pit of socialism into which he’ll throw us. They ignore the fact that Bush is still the president and it is he who is bringing the bounties of socialism to us in a desperate attempt to rescue an economy, which has foundered on his watch.

Already you can see signs that the Republican Party is getting ready to blame Obama for the economic hell that it left for him to conquer.

You want to talk dumb? When Obama named Hillary Clinton his Secretary of State-designate, the Republican National Committee put out a list of campaign statements Senator Clinton made during her primary fight with Obama. It asked whether the senator “still carries those same, real concerns about President-elect Obama and his stances on critical issues confronting the nation.”

The country is coming apart at the seams and the Republican Party is still trying to undermine public confidence in the man charged with saving us.

Now that’s what I call dumb.

I rest my case.

(This column is distributed by Minuteman Media)