According to a new story out on NPR via the Sunlight Foundation, our Congressional Representatives speak at a 10th Grade level.
So, all those jokes about our politicians being sophomoric idiots, is apparently, sadly true. And that's just the average. There are some that score even lower than that. For a moment, I started to gloat, as I read that the lowest scorers tended to be "Freshmen," and wingnuts, but honestly, there is nothing funny about this.
Honestly, I get nervous when people offer simple answers to complex problems. I get extra nervous when people try and dumb things down. Because I never fail to wonder what they are hiding in their sins of omission. What crucial information are they leaving out in order to pacify the public, and/or to cover their own asses?
Mulvaney graduated with honors from Georgetown and earned a law degree at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His father was a high school grammar teacher.
"I was trained to write in a clear and concise fashion, and you didn't use big words if small words would do," he says. "Certainly I'm not trying to dumb down the message by any stretch of the imagination."
But sometimes the big words are precise and necessary in order to communicate the body of a subject, or a law, or hearing. Too often it seems that in allowing legislators to express personal vitriol, that insults are considered an acceptable proxy for real information.
We make fun of this, but that's because if we don't laugh, we might lose hope. We might lose our stuff.
And given the overly simplistic *notions that politicians seem to have regarding women's health care, or science in general, none of this really surprises me. The weird mixture of anti-intellectualism with misogyny has been painfully apparent to me, for the past 20 years.
Rape is a nice short word. And yet members of our legislature want to redefine it. Why?
Rape is only really rape if it involves force. So says the new House Republican majority as it now moves to change abortion law.
The same mentality that is behind anti-evolution is deeply entwined with the negative campaign against women's sovereignty [see GOP War on Women].
My observations have been, that over the years, since this radical takeover by wingnuts has progressed, that more and more of our legislation harkens back to how many angels dance on the head of a pin, rather than actually, solving real world problems that exist here and now.
When religion is used to write laws, expect all benefits to occur after death. Expect all punitive damages to occur during the commission of alleged, moral crimes. It would explain why highly educated men and women might opt for a plainer speaking style, or one that invokes religious imagery as opposed to factual considerations.
I observe that it all comes down to dog whistle politics, and emotional manipulations of the lowest common denominator. When short words hide big problems, the phrase, "Out of Sight, Out of Mind," is put into play.
Rather than lift people up, lets put them all down and put the good life out of reach. And remind them daily who plays the role of the welcome mat when those plutocratic princes come a-visiting.
If these legislators were truly concerned with Obfuscation, they would have fought more for the rights of citizens, regarding the Freedom of Information Act, and the Patriot Act for starters. And there would be no clause that hides donors in Citizen's United. And there would be no laws being passed that upend Informed Consent for *only women in their Doctor's office. And what could be more obfuscating to our rights as Citizens than "Warrantless Wiretapping"? And there certainly would not be a Haliburton Loophole.
But, I suppose, obfuscation is the eye of the beholder.