President Bush proudly proclaimed “Mission accomplished” on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. The war wasn’t and still isn’t over. If the mission was to remove Saddam Hussein from power, I guess you could call that small piece of the puzzle known as Iraq a fait accompli.
But the war went on. All sides suffered thousands of military and civilian casualties. The United States poured billions of dollars down that drain. No end was in sight. And when the American people had the chance to vote Bush and Cheney out of office in November 2004, they didn’t do it.
Are Americans stupid, naïve or both? It’s hard to tell. If you watch TV a lot, as I do, you know that we are a self-deprecating people. We recognize our faults and laugh out loud at our mistakes, missteps and misinformation. We even have a general knowledge game show that invites adults to compete against fifth-graders - 9-11-year-olds - and there is no shortage of grown-up contestants who are eager to reveal just how little they know.
Another indicator of how ignorant many of us are is Jay Leno’s feature on the Tonight Show, Jaywalking. I realize that the recurring bit is probably edited down considerably - watching people answer simple questions correctly is not funny. So what is shown are the many interviewees, regular people on the street, who don’t know diddly-squat about civics, current events, history and geography.
Sure, I chuckled when someone thought that Waterloo was Nixon’s downfall and she had no idea what pleading the fifth means. But I felt sad about the pitiful situation and guilty for laughing about it afterward. It’s really pathetic that so many people are so uninformed.
So, knowing that not everyone is in the know, the Democrats are wheeling and dealing both upfront and behind the scenes. Convention delegates, super-delegates, super-super and super-duper delegates, people whom the Party deems to be brighter than the rest of us, might make the final decision as to who will go up against John McCain. That’s fine with me, up to a point. Before those super-to-the-max delegates are seated at the convention, lock them in a room and make them take a test. Make sure they know who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb.