Recommended: The Politics of Stupidity

E. J. Dionne has an interesting Op Ed in The Washington Post for July 29, 2010 entitled The Politics of Stupidity. It is certainly true that both this Democratic administration and the last Republican administration have pursued expensive foreign wars without asking the American people to pay for them with higher taxes. To date we have spent over $1 TRILLION on the Iraq and Afghanistan military operation, without any idea how to pay for it beyond just borrowing more from the world.

And it is equally true that the Senate is highly dysfunctional, as this year's antics have demonstrated. In fact, Congress as a whole is highly dysfunctional. For example, the pay-as-you-go rule that Congress passed, that requires that new programs be paid for with new taxes or matching cuts in other programs, is meaningless, because Congress repeatedly bypasses it. Similarly the debt ceiling is meaningless, because every few months Congress simply votes to increase it.

Dionne asks the incisive question: "Can a nation remain a superpower if its internal politics are incorrigibly stupid?" As he says later in the article, "I'm a chronic optimist about America. But we are letting stupid politics, irrational ideas on fiscal policy and an antiquated political structure undermine our power."