Nothing more to hear, no further evidence to weigh, no more vetting to do. On one side, a vile-tempered intellectually bankrupt mendacious old reprobate shuffling dodderingly after his ever more elusive political dream. On the other a thoughtful and charismatic man of ideas gliding toward the finish line. The choice is clear but not the outcome. Bill Maher contends the American voter "is too fucking stupid to do the right thing" and he may be right.
Take the 2000 election, won by Al Gore, but handed to the imbecile incumbent by a hopelessly corrupted Supreme Court majority. Scalia, Thomas, O'Connor, and Kennedy are scheduled to join Rehnquist on the eternal hot seat for handing the White House to the bumbling malefactor who's brought the nation and the world to its knees. But the fact that the election was so close as to depend on the impossibly corrupt Florida vote was not the Supremes' fault. Although 51 million voted for Gore, 50.5 million of the "fucking stupid" cast their ballots for the current imposter in chief.
And the choice then was as clear as it is today. The GOP offered up a reckless willfully ignorant lying coward, phony as a three dollar bill, vicious as a snake. That he's proven more destructive than a hurricane, volcano eruption, and tsunami combined should not have surprised anyone. In what ought to have been no contest, the Democrats ran a future winner of the Nobel peace prize. Yet partly thanks to Maureen Dowd endlessly prating about Gore's tan suits and her colleagues to a man mindlessly repeating the myriad lies spoon fed to them by the GOP, half the electorate was indeed so "fucking stupid" as to do the wrong thing.
The result was four years of a presidential performance so cataclysmically awful as to all but break the nation's back. Its criminal negligence led to the worst attack on our soil since Pearl Harbor, not one but two neo-Vietnams, the shattering of the government in ways that were soon to bear rotten fruit in the Gulf states and soon after to foster the economic chaos that now engulfs us all. Not to mention the shredding of the constitution at home and the degradation of our good name abroad. Voters therefore faced an even clearer choice in 2004: A man for whom crimes against humanity doesn't begin to describe his record, against a statesmanlike war hero and thinking man of conscience. The "fucking stupid" electorate did the wrong thing again by a margin of three million.
Can we hope that having been fooled twice, the electorate is now prepared to admit "shame on us" and do the right thing? Or will the mangled words of the fucking idiot in chief prove prophetic? "Fool me once, shame on you" he once observed. "Fool me twice – it's a shame." Though if the great unwashed half of the electorate is fooled a third time it'll be far beyond a shame. They will have the fiasco of a government they deserve, perhaps. The rest of us will just have the fiasco.