perfidy

Sometimes the notion occurs to me that one of the founding principles of the United States - that regular folks should be represented by other regular folks - was a terrible idea. If you have faith that the general mass of humanity are smart enough to tie their shoelaces and not drink their coffee til it's cool enough not to burn, that's a brilliant plan. However, if your faith in humanity extends no farther than the conviction that people are in general pretty dumb, then the Founder's great Enlightenment-driven zeal seems rather less well founded.

As the axiom goes, in a democracy, people tend to get the leader they deserve. While that might be a comforting thought to some folks, it fills me with the screaming horrors. Three vignettes from the past few days should suffice to explain.

Case the first: Sen. Tom Delay (R-Texas). Speaking about the Supreme Court's hearings today on the display of the Ten Commandments in public spaces, he said "I hope the Supreme Court will finally read the Constitution and see there's no such thing, or no mention, of separation of church and state in the Constitution."

While this is in fact true in a strict actuarial sense, there is a mention of separation of church and state in the first amendment to the Constitution. While Tom DeLay gets points for effort, I strongly suspect that the Chewbacca defense won't work on most members of the Supreme Court. Moreover, DeLay implies that the eight and one half members of the Supreme Court have not actually read the document they swore to uphold, when it's perfectly clear that at least few of them did at least once.

Clearly, Texans are pretty dumb.

Case the second: Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). Speaking about broadcast decency, Stevens said that his next trick as head of the Senate Commerce Committee would be to push for broadcast decency standards for cable and satellite entertainment.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens said on Tuesday he would push for applying broadcast decency standards to cable television and subscription satellite TV and radio.

"Cable is a much greater violator in the indecency area," the Alaska Republican told the National Association of Broadcasters, which represents most local television and radio affiliates. "I think we have the same power to deal with cable as over-the-air" broadcasters.

"There has to be some standard of decency," he said. But he also cautioned that "No one wants censorship."

Stevens told reporters afterward that he would push legislation to apply the standards to cable TV and satellite radio and television. It could become part of a pending bill to boost fines on broadcasters who violate indecency restrictions or of an effort to overhaul U.S. communications laws.

--snip--

Federal regulations bar broadcast television and radio stations from airing obscene material and restrict indecent material, such as sexually explicit discussions or profanity, to late-night hours when children are less likely to be watching or listening.

Stevens said he disagreed "violently" with assertions by the cable industry that Congress does not have the authority to impose limits on its content.

"If that's the issue they want to take on, we'll take it on and let the Supreme Court decide," he said.

I'm not sure I understand. People pay for cable and satellite programming. I pay for titties and swears, and I darn well know it. Is Stevens implying that the American people are too dumb to know what it is they are paying $50 a month for, that they are too dumb to know what they want? Well... I wouldn't put it past them, but Ockham's Razor applies here.

Alaskans must be pretty dumb.

Case the third: Rep. John Tierney (D-MA 6th District). Recently the US House of Representatives voted to raise the maximum fines that can be levied for showing boobies on TV or saying "shit" on the radio. That bastion of searingly intrepid investigative journalism, Rolling Stone, observes that for the same price of $500,000 per incident,

If the bill passes the Senate, Bono saying "fucking brilliant" on the air would carry the exact same penalty as illegally testing pesticides on human subjects. And for the price of Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl, you could cause the wrongful death of an elderly patient in a nursing home and still have enough money left to create dangerous mishaps at two nuclear reactors. (Actually, you might be able to afford four "nuke malfunctions": The biggest fine levied by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last year was only $60,000.)

Why do I pick on Rep. John Tierney of the Massachusetts 6th when the vote sailed through the House 389-38?? Because I voted for him, and I goddamn well guarantee you my vote wasn't cast so he could fritter away his days banning titties on the tube like a craven little sock puppet for the Moral Majority. Hey John! I'm a champion grudge-holder, and come 2006, I'm going to vote for titties!

Well everyone, the joke's on me. People in Massachusetts must be pretty fucking dumb.

[wik] Gerard of the American Digest writes,

I take your point about the general attitude of DeLay, but I don't think it is a dubious assertion to say that his reference to the Constitution *does not* take the amendments into account. As far as my own experience in discussion goes, when people say "The Constitution" they mean the entire document, amendments and all. As you are aware, the interpretation of the clause under examination in the first amendment is where the argument lies. To assert that DeLay means other than the whole document seems to me to be a weak read.

That's exactly my point. DeLay knows-- and everybody knows-- that the 1st Amendment is an amendment to the Constitution, and therefore is part of it. But, my politician's mind tells me that, if pressed on this, DeLay is able to justify his howler of a comment by arguing that the Bill of Rights is the Bill of Rights TO the Constitution, an appendage, and therefore not technically part of the original whole. That interpretation is correct in a strictly technical sense, but crashingly disingenuous in the colloquial. It would be like getting on someone for lying for saying "I buttoned up my shirt" by claiming that since they started at the top button, they had actually buttoned *down*their shirt.

I feel I'm giving DeLay the benefit of the doubt here. If he is in fact arguing that the 1st Amendment does NOT contain a clause prohibiting the establishment of a state religion and state endorsement of one religion over others, then he is either A) dumber than I ever suspected or B) thinks we're all that dumb, and therefore is himself even dumber than that. While I know he's pretty damn dumb, I prefer to hold out hope he's being a mealy-mouthed politician rather than either A or B.

[alsø wik] Patton, a Texan, writes in agreement that Texans are, in fact, dumb. To plunder Raymond Chandler, down these dumb streets walks a man who is not himself dumb.