Truly Stupid

If America’s future place in the world depends on “smart power,” one glance at the Republican primaries should be enough to scare you to death.

I get queasy every time my plane taxis down the runway. Now I’m getting the same funny feeling — not because of my (thankfully) mild fear of flying, but rather from the cognitive dissonance I felt on reading Joseph Nye’s book “The Future of Power.” Nye, a Harvard professor well connected in Washington, argues that the United States can maintain its leading role globally and avoid an escalation with China, but that it will require one thing above all on America’s part: “smart power.”

It’s the “smart” part that makes me queasy, because over the past week I’ve been closely following the Republican primary debates. And who wouldn’t be scared to death if they did likewise?

Verbal attacks rather than substance

It’s indisputable that those debates have their entertainment value, precisely because it displays the main protagonists, Hobbes fashion, as being anti-everything. Herman Cain, erstwhile Godfather’s Pizza boss, sees himself as being above suspicion that he at some point put his hands on something other than pizza dough and pepperoni. Cain maintains his innocence and accuses Rick Perry of secretly waging a media mudslinging campaign against him.

Perry, governor of Texas, is in turn highly scandalized by the accusation! But that doesn’t prevent him from from suspecting Mitt Romney of being the real culprit in the scandal. The entertaining farce, while having comic moments, also leaves a bitter aftertaste because Cain and Perry both seem to engage in personal attacks for the simple reason that they have nothing of substance to offer anyone.

Perry — like every other Republican would-be candidate before him — plans to do away with several governmental agencies in order to save taxpayers money. But no matter how heard he thought, darned if he was able to remember in a nationally televised debate just which agencies he had in mind. Oops! Meanwhile, Cain added to his dubious resume by — in the best Sarah Palin tradition — at first not having an opinion concerning the latest developments in Libya and finally by placing the Taliban and al-Qaida on the scene there.

Voodoo, God and children’s rights

It goes without saying that both contenders believe neither in climate change nor evolution, thereby aligning them with Michele Bachmann. Bachmann, a born again Christian, considers the scientific consensus on global warming to be voodoo, prompting Matt Taibbi to remark, “Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions.” So it’s no surprise that Bachmann sees a connection between homosexuality and Satan, while her husband has for years offered a therapy he claims will “heal” those afflicted of their satanical predilections.

Even both moderate candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have done a near about face on the subject of climate change and now doubt the scientific findings. In Gingrich’s case, the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) aren’t the only things he says an alert mind should challenge. High on his list are also U.S. child labor laws; the prohibition against hiring nine- to 14-year-old children or strictly regulating their employment, he claims, contributes significantly to the high level of child poverty in large U.S. cities.

So, in Gingrich’s own words, they truly are stupid.