THE SCANDAL OF STUPIDITY

If you've seen the story all over the media about incoming Democrat Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Silvestre Reyes botching basic questions about Middle East politics, you've probably asked yourself – are these guys really that dumb?

Here's one way to answer the question.  Until he was tapped by President Bush to run the Security & Exchange Commission, Chris Cox (R-CA 1989-2005) was acknowledged for years to possess the most formidable brains on Capitol Hill.  There is absolutely no doubt – he is breathtakingly bright.

But when I tweaked him once about his reputation (I've known Chris since 1986 when he joined the legal counsel's office in the Reagan White House), he gave me a bemused smile and said, "Jack, being the smartest man in Congress is like being the tallest building in Topeka."

Some years ago, I embarked with my youngest son Jackson upon what I called our Nifty Fifty Project, for him to experience something memorable and cool in each of all 50 states.  He was seeing so much of the world (North Pole, Amazon, Sahara, Tibet, Mongolia, etc.), and I wanted him to know and love his own country.

By 2004, Jackson was 12 and we were getting close.  Out of a handful of states left was Minnesota.  So when I ran into a Congressman from Minnesota – I'd rather not mention his name other than to say he was a Republican – I asked him what he thought would be the coolest thing in his state for a 12 year-old boy to experience.

He thought for a moment, and then said, "How about the Spam Museum?"

Yes, there really is a Spam Museum, 16,500 square feet memorializing luncheon meat in Austin, Minnesota.  It was the best idea this congresscritter could come up with.

Jackson and I ended up going sea-kayaking and hiking along the state's Lake Superior "North Shore" instead.

I could provide lots more examples, as could anyone familiar with Capitol Hill.  It's simply astonishing how stupid some of our elected official are.  (Patty Murray (D-WA) and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), widely recognized as the two dumbest members of the Senate, quickly come to mind.)

We focus on the crooks in Congress – like Duke Cunningham, or William "Cold Cash" Jefferson – the Democrat from Louisiana just re-elected despite the FBI finding 90K in his freezer and his two partners in jail for bribing him.

Yet the crooks are in the minority in Congress, while the dumb ones are not – and the dumb ones can do far more damage to our wealth and freedom than the crooks.

The real scandal in Congress is the stupidity.  And the ignorance.

There's a fellow I know on the House Science Committee.  He's not dumb.  But he knows nothing about science.  I mean zero. He never took a science class in college. Ask him just about any question on basic physics, chemistry, or any other branch of science and you'll get a blank stare.  Which means he can be gamed by pseudo-science scams – and vote to enact them into law or subsidize them with our money.

Fortunately, he's pro-freedom, doesn't want to use pseudo-science scares as a rationale for expanding government power, and has a good amount of plain common sense.  So he's not taken in by global warming hysteria.  But Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), on the other hand is someone on the Science Committee who is really dumb, really ignorant, and really anti-freedom – a very dangerous combo.

The structural problem, however, is far more dangerous than any of these folks by themselves.  An unimaginably complex $12 trillion GDP economy is at Congress' mercy.  The intrusion of hundreds of thousands of federal regulations into our lives and businesses, authorized by folks in Congress too dumb to understand them or their implications – this was not what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Constitution.

The Scandal of Stupidity is one of the most persuasive practical reasons for reducing government interference in our lives back to Constitutional limits.   

There's such an opportunity for it to be exploited to the max now with an internet technology called YouTube.  Short videos can be posted on it, which can spread "virally" to millions of viewers. 

Last August, someone had a personal video camera on Senator George Allen at an obscure campaign rally in backwoods Virginia when he called a leftie heckler a "macaca."  This would have been a total non-event except that it was posted on YouTube and downloaded by millions of people. 

It became a gigantic nationwide embarrassment for Allen with his Democrat opponent claiming "macaca" is a racist insult in a language no one could name.  Allen never recovered and he lost to James Webb on November 7.

The left has figured out how to make a smear mountain out of a tongueslip molehill with YouTube.  But such "gotcha" phony outrage victimhood ploys are soon to get boring.  Demonstrations of dumbness have far more impact and are far more entertaining.

It's hard to demonstrate that a politician is a crook, usually taking an FBI investigation to do so. But it's easy to show how dumb he is if there's a tape on YouTube. 

Unfortunately, Silvestre Reyes' interview with Jeff Stein of the Congressional Quarterly wasn't taped.  You can bet that from now on, a lot more interviews of politicos will be with small handycams.  Thanks to YouTube, millions of Americans are going to be seeing vivid illustrations of the room temperature IQs possessed by those they voted for. 

It'll be the next big rage, the next big scandal in politics.  And it will be a lot of fun to watch.