CT Blue

At least, I’m fairly sure we must be, for could there be a country in which people are stupider than our fellow citizens:

If you haven’t heard, there’s going to be a large military exercise around the country from July 15th to September 15th. It’s called Jade Helm 15 because all military trainings have names and that one wasn’t taken, I suppose. Texas has five counties involved and the rightwing is damn sure that it means Obama is taking over and gonna put all them in a concentration camp Just! Like! Hitler!

So one of the Texas counties is Bastrop. Bastrop is between here and Austin. There’s some strange people living there.

After the county judge gave the military permission to hold some of these trainings in Bastrop, the citizenry went beeeeserk.

Lt. Col. Mark Lastoria answered questions for two hours from a crowd of more than 150 people at a special meeting of the Bastrop County Commissioners, hoping to allay locals’ concerns that the training operation is a way for the federal government to take over Texas and much of the Southwest. Instead, Lastoria was told that he couldn’t be trusted and was asked whether Jade Helm 15 will involve bringing foreign fighters from the Islamic State to Texas, whether U.S. troops will confiscate Texans’ guns and whether the Army intends to implement martial law through the exercise. (The answer for all three was no.)

via Crooks and Liars

Now, I know what anyone who might chance to read this is thinking right now: that I am unfairly maligning all Americans by lumping them in with Texans. But here’s the thing, in order for the rest of us to bring our national average up past moron, much less all the way to world average, we’d have to all be Einsteins, and that’s not taking into consideration the fact that the rest of the Old Confederacy is jam packed with people every bit as stupid as the Bastroptonians. As Dean Baker’s Mister Arithmetic would point out, there’s a lot of people in Texas, and even if you exclude half the population of Austin on the theory that not everyone in that island of sanity is as drop dead stupid as the folks in Bastrop, you are still left with an enormous number of people bringing down the national average.

So, again, let me humbly propose that we re-open negotiations with the Confederacy. Not taking anything away from Abraham Lincoln, a truly great man, but maybe he missed an opportunity. If we got rid of the Southland, and merely brought the average IQ in this country even with, lets say, Canada, there’s no end to what we could accomplish. The folks in Bastrop would jump at the chance to make sure that the federal government couldn’t possibly take their guns, and we here in the North could actually make some progress in making sure people that stupid aren’t allowed to have guns here. A win-win for everyone, though we’d have to make plans for the refugee camps sure to spring up along our Southern border. Not that we’d try to keep any of the refugees out; anyone smart enough to want to escape should be welcomed with open arms.