It Takes a Certain Kind of Stupid to Be a Political Commentator - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
It Takes a Certain Kind of Stupid to Be a Political Commentator
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Do journalism schools have a course called Stupidity 101, or is this something one picks up like a virus after working in the industry for a few years? I’m talking about the kind of stupidity that’s not found in folks who have real jobs or small businesses. Folks who have to worry about the slings and arrows of the daily grind.

These are regular folks who don’t live and breathe politics because they have concerns that are more urgent. Like whether their jobs will be out-sourced to China, or their wages depressed by illegal aliens who are paid “off the books” by employers who’d rather not pay for Social Security or Obamacare if they have a choice in the matter.

These regular folks worry about the racial tensions their children encounter at school, and about the riots and Islamic terror attacks that appear to be increasing at an exponential rate and that promise soon to come to a neighborhood near them.

They worry about the rising cost of energy and taxes and at what point they’ll no longer able to meet their mortgage payments. And so many other things that make a difference in their lives.

Here’s what they don’t worry about.

Donald Trump’s tax returns, or just how rich he is. He’s certainly richer than the jerk who’s asking the questions.

Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Wherever he was born, he’s only got a few months left in office.

The details of Trump’s plan to defeat ISIS. They know Hillary’s plan — whatever that was — never got off the ground.

The “well-regarded national security experts” who are supporting Hillary, knowing that as Secretary of State she used an unsecured server to send highly classified information. That, by her own admission, she never learned how to tell if a document was marked “confidential.” Wasn’t that “C” a paragraph marker? And by the way, aren’t they concerned about the 33,000 emails she deleted from her private server?

The “top business executives at the nation’s largest companies” who are supporting Hillary rather than Trump. These business executives don’t care about us, the regular folk think, and Donald Trump does.

The assortment of petty allegations of stuff that happened in the 1970s. Oh, please!

And yet an intelligent man like Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute thinks that Donald Trump let his supporters down by not addressing these issues properly in his first debate with Hillary. Really?

Most people tuned in to find out about where the candidates stood on issues that would impact upon their lives. Except for the media types or academics, most of the audience tuned out after the first 30 minutes when things started to get really, really boring. You know, like when Hillary talked about some architect in the audience who hadn’t been paid or paid enough.

Or like when she went through the same old list of Trump’s sexist comments. After hearing them repeated about 500 times, we think you should get over it. Don’t you get it? We’re bored. We’d rather hear from the 500 ladies that Bill and Hillary abused. Bringing them onto the stage might wake up the audience.

Oh, and Mr. Riley? About your suggestion that Trump insulted black Americans by talking about those who were unemployed or living in poverty or in war zones where their children could be shot by a stray bullet fired from a car that comes zipping through the kitchen window? You say this doesn’t describe the “vast majority of black people in the U.S.” Have a walk around inner cities like Chicago and Detroit. You don’t think the situation is dire? You want to quibble about numbers?

I believe that the vast majority of voters who aren’t part of the media or academia don’t give a hoot about the matters that Mr. Riley raises. They’re too smart. They want to hear about issues that affect their bottom line. By focusing on inconsequential arcana, their real-life concerns are trivialized.

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