We’ve inundated Washington DC with utter fools

Early in the 20th century, there was a famous columnist known as H.L. Mencken. Two of his quotes are currently quite applicable.

Number one: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Number two: “No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

I point this out because we live in a representative democracy, so when we see spectacles like what we saw in the House of Representatives yesterday, it’s important to remember that these are all elected representatives of the United States.

We have filled Washington, D.C., with complete imbeciles. This is our fault because we vote for them. The fact is that if you don’t like your representatives, you can always change your them, but it seems as though the American people increasingly like a Congress that is completely unworkable; a presidency filled with numskulls like the current president of the United States; and entire representative agencies of the federal government that are filled with people whose IQs, when combined, might be in double digits.

If you think I’m being harsh, I present to you the spectacle yesterday, which is not, in fact, from Jerry Springer.

It is from Congress.

WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show

Yesterday, a giant fight broke out between Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the noted intellectual congresswoman from Georgia, known colloquially as MTG, on one side, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the noted intellectual congresswoman from New York, known colloquially as AOC, and Rep. Jasmine Crockett from Texas on the other side.

You can tell this is similar to a World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) face-off when the congresspeople are known by their acronyms.

The wattage displayed by these three ladies put feminism back about 100 years, as shown by the fact that two of the men who are leading this committee, James Comer on the Republican side, and Jamie Raskin on the Democratic side, could not help but laugh at the idiocy displayed by this coterie of crows.

It began when Marjorie Taylor Greene insulted Jasmine Crockett’s fake eyelashes and went downhill from there. AOC snapped, “I would like to move to take down Miss Green’s words. That is absolutely unacceptable. How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person.”

Greene: “Are your feelings hurt? Aww.”

AOC: “Oh, girl, baby girl, baby girl. Don’t even play. Don’t even play. We are going to move and we’re going to take your words down.”

After MTG said she would agree to take her words down, AOC demanded an apology. MTG refused. Crockett later said to Comer, “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling. If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleached-blond, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”

Comer, genuinely puzzled: “What now?”

A shouting match then ensued.

The question about all this is why? Why? These are outtakes from “Idiocracy” at this point.

The answer is because Congress and our representative government have become a performative spectacle for people who are hoping to get famous and rich outside of Congress. That’s what this is. Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute wrote one of the most important books of the last 20 years about this — about how our representative institutions ar supposed to shape the people who enter them because they are given the grave responsibility of representing the American people, taking care of trillions of our taxpayer dollars, figuring out our foreign policy, and trying to rectify breaches in the social fabric and the social compact. That is their actual job.

But over time, as we have become a more populous and populist country, our representatives have become stand-ins for our various gripes and grievances.

And so you end up with the dumbed-down version of the American public. I don’t think that this is a partisan issue. I know hundreds of members of Congress and the Senate, both Democrat and Republican, and I can name the number of intelligent people that I know in Congress on less than two hands.

The American people have chosen poorly. It used to be when government did not have insane levels of power over our life, we didn’t actually care who was in charge of the government nearly as much because the government didn’t have the power to control every aspect of our life. Thus, politics was largely relegated to the local level. And when it came to federal politics, people who were very invested in federal politics tended to be the people who were the most knowledgeable, the people who actually cared the most, the people who were the most engaged.

But now, it’s become a popularity contest. It’s “American Idol,” and thanks to the mass media, you can take dullards and make them incredibly famous. If you want to sell papers, that’s exactly what you do. If you want higher ratings, you focus on the dullards in Congress, not the congressperson who is spending late nights poring over the bills that are being created to shape our lives; that’s the boring stuff.

The people like this. And this is why all three of these congresspeople are significantly more famous than some actual powerful congresspeople who make policy. People now use Congress as a platform for other activities to become famous — to be on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, to be on various shows on TV.

That’s not good for America. Americans ought to get off of this.

But the reality, of course, is that this has pervaded American politics, and it has bled up. The quality of our public leadership is a reflection of the quality of our public conversations. And our public conversations are terrible because they are low IQ and do not involve any sort of actual knowledge base for the people involved. In fact, a quick insult is considered significantly more useful than an actual understanding of the issues at play and the nuances of those issues. The latter things are not important.

This is one of the reasons why you are seeing re-engagement online with three-hour long conversations with various hosts. There is a hunger in a certain segment of the population for something a little more substantive that has completely gone away for the vast majority of the American public.

The American people are casually engaged. They tune in for the last five minutes of “American Idol” before they cast their vote.

And what you end up with is a bunch of people who are getting rich and famous being in Congress and being complete imbeciles.

This is why you end up with a presidential race featuring an incumbent president who is full-on senile, and it doesn’t matter one whit to at least half the population.

I think most people look at yesterday’s debacle in Congress and they’re ashamed of what they see.

We should all be ashamed of what we see in Congress because the level of intellectual achievement in our Congress, the level of true engagement with serious issues, is so unbelievably low that you would get a better conversation about what goes on in our nation in a third-grade social studies classroom than you would in a congressional committee such as yesterday’s.

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