Dumbfuckery du Jour

He'll be on about repealing the 13th Amendment next, mark my words:

I like to think I can take a joke, and appreciate political commentary intended as humor, but this item from Thomas Mitchell, editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, wasn't amusing. The headline read, "Time to repeal the 19th Amendment?"

People and candidates for public office should be judged on the basis of their ideas, stance on the issues, character, experience and integrity, not on the basis of age, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion or disability.

Therefore, we must repeal the 19th Amendment. Yes, the one granting suffrage to women. Because? Well, women are biased..... Men are consistent. Women are fickle and biased.

To "prove" his point, Mitchell, head of Nevada's largest newspaper, pointed to poll results showing women voters in the state preferring Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) over former state Sen. Sue Lowden (R) by a narrow margin, but preferring Reid over real estate agent Danny Tarkanian by a wide margin. This is evidence of "bias." (That women voters might perceive Lowden as more qualified than Tarkanian doesn't seem to enter the equation at all.)

Mitchell also pointed to recent Gallup data that showed, nationwide, women tend to prefer Democrats, while men tend to prefer Republicans. This, apparently, substantiates the argument that ... well, actually, I have no idea.

If there's a clever insight here, it's hiding well.

For fuck's sake, the vast majority of men in the 19th Century were more enlightened than this.  This little shit stain sounds like he's pining for ancient Greece, where women were basically nothing more than prisoners in their homes.  Perhaps he'd like to emigrate to Saudi Arabia, where that's still the case.

We'll see what his next brainwave is.  It could be repealing the 13th, which outlawed slavery (the Bible sez slaves are okay, after all!), or he might start arguing in favor of abolishing child labor laws.  After all, those icky delinquents wouldn't be so delinquent if they had to work 18 hours a day.

Mitchell joins Sarah Palin in abject ignorance.  Her latest pearl of unwisdom:

A certain former half-term governor appears to be drifting even further away from the American mainstream. Over the weekend, appearing at an evangelical Christian women's conference in Louisville, Sarah Palin rejected the very idea of separation of church and state, a bedrock principle of American democracy.

She asked for the women -- who greeted her with an enthusiastic standing ovation -- to provide a "prayer shield" to strengthen her against what she said was "deception" in the media.

She denounced this week's Wisconsin federal court ruling that government observance of a National Day of Prayer was unconstitutional -- which the crowd joined in booing. She asserted that America needs to get back to its Christian roots and rejected any notion that "God should be separated from the state."

Palin added that she was outraged when President Obama said that "America isn't a Christian nation."

The amusing aspect of this is the notion that the United States would return to its roots with support for National Day of Prayer observances. That's backwards -- Thomas Jefferson and James Madison explicitly rejected state-sponsored prayer days. I'll look forward to the conservative explanation of how the Founding Fathers were godless socialists.

A student of history she ain't.  She keeps dropping these little pearls all over the place, but it seems that her pearls have retained the speck of shit at their core whilst forgoing the pearl part. 

If Mitchell'd had Sarah Palin in mind when he whined that women shouldn't be involved in politics, I might have almost sympathized with his position...