Goines On: Perplexed

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Goines overheard someone questioning his focus in life, opining that his focus might not be advantageous and that he focused overmuch on his immediate thoughts because he was suffering from nearsightednss.
    Though a bit chagrined by that opinion, he had been furnished painful evidence the day before that he might really need to focus even more carefully on his immediate thoughts, that his supposed nearsightedness might be more a form of nearmindedness, of a failure to perceive what should be obvious. Disadvantageous focus indeed!

Why we desperately need to make use of women’s intelligence

Men just aren’t that smart

By Moristotle

Take a perhaps typical man. He turns the key to lock his garden shed’s sliding glass door, and then tries to turn the key back 180° to extract it from the lock. It won’t budge. He jiggles it. He pushes it in the tiny fraction of an inch it will go and tries again. Still the key won’t move. Shit!

"McCain will have no trouble in Missouri"

A news article this morning on NPR ("Joplin May Be Reddest Corner in Missouri," by Linda Wertheimer) investigates how likely it is that the bellweather state of Missouri will again "pick the president." Only once in a century have Missouri's electoral votes not gone to the candidate who became president. (Missouri went for Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kevaufer in 1956.)

Polls currently show the Democratic and Republican tickets running neck and neck over Missouri as a whole, but apparently not in Jasper County. At about four minutes into Ms. Wertheimer's article, we're treated to this frank admission by a shop owner in Joplin, who says that "McCain will have no trouble in Missouri":

He's against abortion, anytime, and he's also, he's against same-sex marriages. Those are very important things to me. The country can go broke, and those things, those morals still stand. If you've got a moral country, God will be with you.

I don't need to parse this for people who can actually think, but if I needed to I might mention, for starters, that "belief in God" confers no moral advantage. In fact, it could weigh against God (if God existed), that the Bible allows itself to be interpreted the way this benighted Missourian interprets it. Also (if I were to mention one more thing), haven't we had enough of people who decide their vote on single issues? "The country can go broke, but..."

..."under God" MUST be mandated for our pledge of allegiance.
...homosexuals MUST not be permitted to marry.
...Roe v. Wade MUST be overturned.
...taxes MUST be lowered.
...the Ten Commandments MUST NOT be removed from our courthouses.

By the way, in my list of labels at the bottom of this post, I didn't choose the labels for how they would sort with respect to which labels would follow "Democrats" and "Republicans." Just turned out that way.

What about Bush?

This just in from The New York Times ("In 2 Pennsylania Towns, Skepticism and Resignation," by Ian Urbina):

CLIFTON HEIGHTS, Pa., Jan. 11 — Hunched over a beer with a crowd of other veterans at the American Legion here, Rocco Polidoro, said he is sure of one thing: President Bush’s plan to send some 20,000 more troops into Iraq will only make matters worse.

“What I don’t understand is who the president is listening to,” said Mr. Polidoro, a life-long Republican who like a majority in this Republican district voted for an anti-war Democrat in the last election. “If vets, military brass, the Baker Committee, the international community and now most voters say it’s time to get out, then in my view it’s time to get out.”

...“It’s one thing to be steadfast and another to be stubborn,” said Rick Lacey, another Republican at the Legion hall who voted for a Democrat in the last election.

So, is Bush steadfast or stubborn...or so dumb that he doesn't even know that almost everyone else is smarter than he is?

I enjoy working with people who are smarter, quicker, abler, and more intelligent than I am, but I'm still smart enough to tell the difference. It's a national tragedy to have someone in the White House who is so dumb that he can't.