Embracing Dumb Doesn’t Make You Smart

The idiot’s version of intelligence is to deny what common sense says is right, and counter it with the opposite of common sense. And it was the Governing Philosophy during the Obama years.

There are no winners in war, only losers. The most arduous nuclear inspection regime in history involves letting Iran inspect its own nuclear sites. Funding a state at war won’t fill its war chest. Rewarding a state sponsor of terror for its activities makes that state less likely to sponsor terror. Deterrence doesn’t work.

The logic at work in some of the more popular arguments made by Obama aides and their validators in the press wasn’t dialectical or paradoxical; e.g., if you want peace, prepare for war. It was Gladwellian—what’s really true is the opposite of whatever you think is true. Of course, that’s not journalism, it’s just marketing, or, in contemporary journalism-speak, Voxsplaining, after the popular liberal website Vox, which devoted itself in its entirety to counter-intuitive self-branded “hot takes” designed to showcase the wisdom of whatever the current Obama administration policy was.

The article limits its discussion to foreign policy, but it extended to domestic policy as well. “Freeing criminals from prison will reduce crime. Massive regulation will help grow the economy. Health care will be cheaper and better if the Government is in charge of it. The economy needs millions of unskilled immigrants even though low skill jobs are in decline.”