Uncle John's Presents Book of the Dumb 2 (19 page)

Ultimately, politics is about people; and as you'll learn in this chapter, it's often about dumb people. Let us note, however, that politically speaking, dumbness is an equal opportunity employer. In a way, it's nice to see stupidity evenly distributed across the entire political experience. In another way, it can make you want to hide in the basement stocked with a good supply of water and canned goods, just in case the political system implodes. Which way you're leaning can depend on what day it is and how many stories you read from this chapter. Courage.

 

G
ive New York City Councilwoman Margarita Lopez this much credit:
her intentions were good, but she lost points on execution. Wanting to call attention to what she believed were deficiencies in educational policy, Lopez issued a press release attacking the policies of promoted by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. There was just one thing Ms. Lopez forgot: when blasting someone else's educational policies, make sure that you yourself appear somewhat educated.

The misstep? See if you can spot it: “Why is Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein ignoring the fact that the test is flawed and discriminatory?” Okay, who can spot the grammatical error? Hands please, let's not have everyone shout it out at once. Yes, that's correct, the first “is” should be “are” in that sentence (there
are
two people referred to in the sentence).

Undaunted, Lopez's office shot out a second release asking: “Why are advocates targeted for examining testing
prodecures
and policies implemented by the Department of Education?” An excellent question, although it would have been made even
more
excellent through the simple use of a spell check. Lopez's office immediately moved to correct the error by issuing a revised press release. The good news: “procedures” was no longer spelled “prodecures.” The bad news: it wasn't spelled “procedures,” either—instead, we were introduced to “proceedures.” Thus was the point of Lopez's press release lost in the din of giggling about her staff's inability to wield the language in a competent fashion.

Lopez herself did not write the press releases, but nevertheless she took the heat, proclaiming: “I take total responsibility . . . The member of my office who committed the mistake is going to be protected by me, the same the way that I protect the children of the City of New York.” Hopefully she'll hold the children of the City of New York to higher spelling standards.

Source:
New York Post

 

T
he spring of 2004 wasn't the most congenial time in American politics,
what with the snowballing presidential campaign and some particularly bad moments in Iraq splitting the nation into highly partisan and largely annoying camps. But even in moments of high political duress, it's a good idea to keep one's cool. It's not like the 1850s, when members of Congress could whack each other with their canes, or even the 1950s, when Harry Truman threatened to beat the crap out of a newspaper critic who had given his daughter a bad review. This is the twenty-first century, and we try to be a little more genteel.

Perhaps Democratic Representative Pete Stark from California didn't get the memo, because when one of his constituents sent him a fax complaining about his vote on a resolution he lost his cool. The constituent, a member of the National Guard and a law student, wrote, in part: “Your no vote on this resolution is a disgrace to the people of this district who have elected you . . . I urge you to stop your contemptuous display of bitter partisanship.”

Less than an hour later, a message appeared on the constituent's cell phone. It was from Congressman Stark himself. He basically ripped the guy a new one, suggesting that “you don't know what you're talking about,” and that “I doubt if you could spell half the words in the letter, and somebody wrote it for you.” However, he promised to call back later “and let you tell me more about why you think you're such a great
[profanity deleted] hero.” Clearly, Stark wasn't worried about getting this guy's vote in November.

Sure, it sounds like Stark got the better of the guy. Here's a tip to you future leaders of America, however: if you leave a message spouting bile upon one of your constituents on his cell phone, don't be surprised if he doesn't keep it to himself. Not long after Stark left the message, a tape of it was aired on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, which allowed that famously bloviating talk show host several minutes of his patented liberal bashing. Probably not what Stark would have wanted at all.

Source:
NBC11.com
,
Trivalleyherald.com

 

H
ere's a little story to inspire confidence in your political institutions.
Over there in Japan, prime minister Junichiro Koizumi had a little sit down with the newest members of parliament from his party and asked them do something for him—stop reading comic books at work!

Is this the Japanese parliament or a high school? If it were the latter, that might explain a lot about Japan's anemic economic performance the last several years. But in fact it's the former. The lawmakers are reading comic books because in Japan, comic books (or “manga”) aren't just for kids; they're common reading material for average adults (it helps that many of the comic books in Japan are quite, uh,
racy
compared to what most American comic books). Everybody has their favorite manga—even parliamentarians.

And therein lay the problem for Prime Minister Koizumi. As newer members of the parliament are seated in the front, the prime minister was getting a mighty fine view of the boys goofing off. So down came the heel. “Don't . . . read comic books in Parliament while in session,” Koizumi was quoted in the Japanese press as saying. “You can be seen very clearly from the prime minister's seat. You should really stop that—it's disgraceful.”

And if they don't stop, Koizumi is going to give them detention.

Source: Associated Press

 

W
e can't say enough good things about Canada,
who even the most jingoistic American will admit is a perfect neighbor. Be that as it may, every once in a while we get an indication that up there in the Great White North, they do things a little differently.

As an example, take the following bit of advice, from the Web site of Elections Canada: “Eating a ballot, not returning it or otherwise destroying or defacing it constitutes a serious breach of the Canada Elections Act.” Which led us to ask, in that logical way of ours, well,
have
Canadians been eating their ballots in numbers large enough to warrant a warning on a government Web site? Sure, you'll always have one or two odd ducks who'll snack on a ballot just because they're pathological paper eaters, but to have the government actually address the issue, there's got to be a bunch of Canadians looking for snacks at their ballot box.

The answer is that indeed there are. The Edible Ballot Society of Canada promotes ballot ingestion as a form of civil disobedience: “Voting is not only useless, it actually undermines genuine democracy by legitimizing an inherently un-democratic process . . . Check out great dishes such as The Ballot Burger, with a side order of Campaign Literature. Or perhaps you enjoy cheese and would like to try a Ballot Fondue,” says the group's Web site (everyone has a Web site these days).

The EBS notes that members of its pulp-loving crew were arrested for eating their ballots in the 1997 and 2000 elections; apparently these incidents caused enough consternation for Elections Canada that they posted a warning. It must have worked, since Canada's 2004 national election was by all indications free of ballot ingestion. We guess this time around, the ballot choices were more palatable than the ballots themselves.

We wonder if the movement would ever catch on here in the United States, although most Americans, confronted with the choices on their ballots are probably less inclined to chuck their ballots
down
their throats than the opposite maneuver entirely.

Source: Reuters, The Edible Ballot Society

 

N
ewspapers can be a rough gig, especially in New York City,
where three daily newspapers kick and bite and scratch and gouge at each other trying to get to the stories first (well, the
Post
and the
Daily News
scratch and gouge; the
Times
sends out a manservant to rough up the others). So in early July 2004, when it was time to sniff out which person Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry would choose as his running mate, all three newspapers were hot on the trail.

And it was the scrappy, sassy
New York Post
—a frequent source for this very book!—that pulled out the scoop: “Kerry's Choice: Dem picks Gephardt as VP candidate,” blasted the
Post
from its front page, referring to Missouri congressman Richard Gephardt. “Gephardt—a 63-year-old power player in Washington for nearly three decades—beat out such contenders as Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina,” read the story, which led on the front and then booted to page four, which was filled with colorful pictures of the erstwhile VP candidate. In all, a nice presentation of a nice scoop—and the
Post
had it in the newsstands while the other papers were still speculating on Kerry's selection.

There was one
minor
factual error with the scoop, however: mainly, that Kerry selected John Edwards for his VP candidate, not Gephardt. So by 9 a.m., the
Post's
big scoop turned into one of the great screw-ups in New York newspaper history and in political reporting—not quite supplanting the
Chicago Tribune's
infamous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline, but rather comfortably settling in to position number two.

Were the other media outlets understanding of the
Post's
error? Nope. The
New York Daily News
was particularly
gleeful: “In another of its ‘Dewey Defeats Truman'–style ‘exclusives,' The
New York Post
reported on its front page and website Tuesday that Missouri Rep. Gephardt was Kerry's choice,” the competing tabloid crowed. “The struggling tabloid's site pulled the embarrassing image of its flat-out-wrong front page and swapped in a wire story instead of its sure-to-stay-exclusive original, but thousands of copies of the baffling Gephardt front page were already on the streets.”

Meanwhile, over at media industry bible
Editor & Publisher,
things weren't much nicer: “
The New York Post
. . . became an object of ridicule Tuesday morning,” E&P noted on the same day.
The Post,
which posts its front page on its Web site, pulled down the page and replaced it with its back page; the “scoop” article was also pulled down. Rather sadly, however, there were still all those thousands of physical copies of the newspaper out there, which were rapidly snapped up as collector's items: “Copies of the paper are already available on eBay,” the E&P said. Some wags speculated that the
Post
purposefully ran the wrong story simply to get a sales spike.

All that was left was for
Post
Editor-in-Chief Col Allan to grovel. “We unreservedly apologize to our readers for the mistake,” Allan wrote in a statement, which did not otherwise explain how such a monumental flub could have happened at one of America's largest dailies. Later rumors suggested it was the owner of the
Post,
Rupert Murdoch, who passed along the information (and who was going to disagree with
him
?)

Oh, well. As they saying goes, “Today's news is tomorrow's fishwrap.” And in this case the
Post
has the advantage that the story already stunk.

Source:
Editor & Publisher,
Associated Press,
New York Daily News, New York Post