That’s fine, but we got into an argument about intelligence. Most politicians have never done anything that they could be held accountable for or that demonstrates their intelligence in any empirical way. They can SOUND smart, but only with the coaching of a large team of professionals and by avoiding situations in which they could be exposed. The more a politician controls the environments in which they speak, the dumber they must be.
That’s certainly a valid opinion. Not sure it has a significant basis in reality though, and certainly not in the case of Barack “*magna cum laude *from Harvard Law School” Obama.
Ted Cruz also graduated Magna cum Laude from Harvard Law. He was also a debate champion. He was even an editor at the Harvard Law Review, just like Obama. I don’t think you can make an empirical case that Obama is any more intelligent than Ted Cruz.
He certainly isn’t stupid, but I’d go with amoral. A dishonest person does knows the difference between right and wrong, as part of some moral code, but chooses to flout the rules. Cruz does not show he possesses a moral code at all or the ability to grasp one, just blind, fiery ambition.
I don’t think anyone can really question Cruz’s intelligence. Whether he has a sense of morality is difficult to know without being inside his head. But his actions certainly demonstrate he’s a shameless demagogue who’s willing to tell outright lies on the national stage in order to further his personal ambitions.
We don’t “give them 24 days notice before inspecting [the other facilities].” If there are undeclared facilities that we suspect of harboring prohibited activity, they HAVE to let us in. And because the deal is so tough, there are explicit limits on how long they get to drag their feet. Under the terms of the agreement, that limit is set at 24 days, which few if any actual arms control experts find objectionable. Now, Cruz may not like that particular provision. That’s his right. But it’s grossly immoral of him as someone in an authority position to get on stage and lie about what it says, especially when many viewers are basically uninformed and looking to the GOP leadership for guidance on how they should think about this deal.
Carson already demonstrated how ideology does blind one:
Well, according to the bible I guess he will have no interest in funding NASA because of all those planetary probes continuously cracking the firmament.
After clerking at SCOTUS, I picture Cruz returning to Texas and deciding to run for office. He gets in front of his first crowd and speaks intelligently about issues in Washington and what he learned while being a young lawyer in DC, and he is met with an awkward silence. Realizing his mistake, he starts rattling off the cray-cray, about how the libruls have a war on Christmas and throwing out the standard “activist judges”, “gay agenda,” and “persecuted Christian” garbage and a giant roar of approval comes from the crowd.
So Ben Carson is either stupid or pandering to stupidity in a dishonest fashion. Frankly, I think he honestly believes some of the bullshit he said, and that makes him pretty willfully ignorant, even if he’s not, in some technical sense, stupid.
Carson is proving to be a great example of how exceptional technical knowledge and skill, in one area, does not in any way preclude being a complete dumbass in others.
