Grounded in Unreality
Sent July 15, 2004

 
Alan Keyes is living proof of the fact that a supposedly intelligent man with an advanced degree from an Ivy League school can still have a grating personality and be pretty stupid when it comes to dealing with people. There’s nothing politically smart, for example, about gratuitously insulting the daughter of your own party’s vice-presidential candidate. George W. Bush, on the other hand, is proof that someone who botched his education at an Ivy League school that he never could have enrolled in on his own merits can still be pretty clever about conning the public by being a seemingly nice, decisive guy about it.

That’s the big difference between Keyes and Bush the Lesser, and what makes the latter more politically effective than the former. What they have in common, though, is scarier: they’re bold, decisive, and speak from strong conviction — about all the wrong things, for all the wrong reasons, and they’re both devastatingly divorced from reality. These guys are so out of it, they wouldn’t recognize a reality check if it punched them in the nose — all the more reason they need one (the reality check, or the punch in the nose? Take your pick).

Here’s the question all voters should force themselves to answer before they enter a voting booth: what good is decisiveness and conviction if you’re decisive about (and convinced of) all the wrong things? What good is it if a man acts boldly but stupidly, because virtually everything he believes and acts upon has been repeatedly shown to be untrue? That’s exactly what Bush the Lesser has been doing for four years — while the polls continue to reward him for it.