Like the Stupidest People Ever

In the mornings, I, like every liberal-minded intellectual blah blah blah, listen to NPR for my daily dose of news. This week, both the public radio stations in my town are having their annoying pledge drives. It's wonderful that they are supported by the local folks, etc, and I'm not going to rail against the pledge drives, because they are important ways for the stations to function.

My particular membership isn't up until the Spring, so I pleasantly tune out of the pledge drives because they are all the things that pledge drives are. Apparently, I switched over to C-SPAN radio. This is probably because I changed the station in the evening, and C-SPAN's stultifying boringness is slightly dulled by the inclusion of peppy programming like 'Booknotes' or whatever in the evening.

Unfortunately, in the morning C-SPAN radio is shockingly, jarringly boring. Pre-7 a.m., they run White House briefings (which, in all honesty, have been interesting lately, because Scotty is getting his ears boxed). Then at 7, the C-SPAN program 'Capitol Journal' comes on. This is the show where a host reads parts of the newspaper over the radio (and on television, with the helpful visual aid of the actual parts of the newspaper) and then takes calls. Later, I believe, there are bland guests.

My major complaint, of course, is the stupidity. People call into the program, and are clearly among the stupidest humans ever to walk the earth. Their raw staggering idiocy, if harnessed properly, could power a nation, could launch a rocket to the moon, could feed the hungry. They are so mind-numbingly stupid, I have trouble believing that the program hasn't been hijacked by the Jerky Boys or Howard Stern.

Here's the functional problem with this. There are two types of people, apparently, who call in to this program. There are the shockingly stupid people, who appear to range across the ideological spectrum, though slightly biased toward the left, and then there are the probably stupid people, whose personal ideological right-wing biases are fueled by listening to the even more ill-informed people who I'm embarrassed to call liberals.

This is because, of course, the majority of Americans are actually more liberal than conservative (just check the rolling poll numbers in support of safe and legal access to abortion, which hasn't budged from 60% in a decade). They are just dumb, apparently, and calling C-SPAN at 7 in the morning. But they say stupid things (Bush bashing is fine, but it helps if you don't sound like a mental patient when you do it) which make the uppity conservative slightly less stupid person feel all high and mighty about how these dumb liberals are. One of these dumb conservatives argued the other morning that 'he supports freedom of speech, but these peopele shouldn't be allowed on the radio.' Um, about that first part...

In sum, cancel Capitol Journal, and save everyone a lot of trouble. There's plenty of dumb in the world, we don't need more.