Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:41 pm
Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM’s weekly program “The Dean Obeidallah Show,” writes in an op-ed at CNN that Donald Trump is a low-information candidate:
Well, Donald Trump is a low-information candidate — as we have seen on a range of issues from his not understanding our military’s nuclear triad to his earning Politifact’s award for “lie of the year” based on his parade of inaccurate statements made during his campaign.
I’m not arguing the point. Obeidallah is right. Self-awareness? Trump sure didn’t take Rudyard Kipling’s advance to “Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves.
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In fact, I’d apply that label to all the Republican candidates for 2016, those still in the race and those who have dropped out. This low-information issue is fed by Fox News, which not only doesn’t actually present its viewers any “news” but doesn’t present them with any facts.
Obeidallah goes after Trump for his sexism as an example: “The latest episode comes in Trump’s use of the word ‘sexism.’ Trump tweeted over the weekend that Bill Clinton has “demonstrated a penchant for sexism” after Hillary announced Bill would be helping her campaign.”
We all no doubt remember the tweet:
Hillary Clinton has announced that she is letting her husband out to campaign but HE'S DEMONSTRATED A PENCHANT FOR SEXISM, so inappropriate!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 27, 2015
As Obeidallah explains, Trump doesn’t understand what sexism is, even though he engaged in it all the time. That may well be true. It may also be true that Trump knows perfectly well what sexism is. After all, he was also a huge Hillary supporter before he became her biggest detractor.
Trump is a pure opportunist, more than willing to throw the past at others while Teflon-coating himself. Point facts out to him and you just become “dumb” or “stupid” or a “loser” and the object of “What a shame!” We may none of us ever know what Trump is really thinking because if he told us, we couldn’t trust him to be honest. It isn’t in him.
None of this means Trump is not a low-information voter, if only because he doesn’t use information whether he knows it or not. And he purposely appeals to low-information voters, who revel in ignorance, who celebrate emoting over thinking, hate over love, fear over understanding.
Courtesy of Dr. David Romei, here is what we are up against:
These men registered to vote today. #Republican primary. Good luck America. pic.twitter.com/Agnjv6rVdl
— Dr. David Romei (@DavidRomeiPHD) December 30, 2015
As Paul Krugman has pointed out, they’re all the same. They’re all extremists and we mustn’t let Trump’s big mouth distract us from Cruz’s evil empire machinations. George Pataki is out, because Pataki killed his own campaign with an appeal to science. He even once told a crowd, “Everything must be science-based.”
Oh dear. You can’t do that in the GOP. Facts are evil. It’s not that Pataki was on the right track, except for the shout out to science. Like all the other Republican hopefuls he thinks government, not corporations, are the enemy, and that radical Islam, not climate change, is the big enemy. Despite his shout-out to science, he no more understood it than Trump does sexism. You can’t pick and choose which science to “believe.”
So let’s dispense right here with the idea that there are any moderate, what we would call “sane” Republican candidates. There aren’t. They all want to bomb people into the stone age or until the sand glows, put troops on the ground everywhere we can get them, and pay for it by cutting taxes to billionaires and corporations. In other words, repeat the ruination wrought on us by George W. Bush in 2008.
Isn’t that great? As Krugman said the other day, take the worst of what Bush did and double down on it. They do this with every election defeat too, so we mustn’t expect them to change. That would make us low-information as well. No, the best we can do is take stock, arm ourselves with facts (not to dispute them because we all know how that goes) but so that we can vote sensibly when the time comes and get these people the f*** out of our government, our lives, our bedrooms, and out of women’s vaginas.
So if you think corporations you don’t get to vote for are your friends, and should regulate themselves; that Muslims are a bigger threat than sea levels rising to your armpits; if you think going duck hunting into Winter Storm Goliath makes sense, as though the ducks won’t still be there when the storm ends; and that a bunch of out-of-shape bear-swillers who lost their razors toting AR-15s (and these are the guys who somehow haven’t either shot themselves or been shot by their kids) offer more protection than the U.S. military, line up over here.
That way we can keep an eye on you. Seriously, we don’t trust you radicalized people with guns standing behind us. You’re not the militia (talk about a low-information understanding of the Second Amendment), but 12-year-olds can’t carry BB guns even in an open-carry state?
The Republican Party has made politics a celebration of literally knowing nothing about anything, but feeling very strongly about it. And they want to run the country.
America deserves, and must demand better than that.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
