Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Some examples...

Stupid Number One: Rightist voters who vote for Republicans because of their perceived strength in combatting terrorism.

...war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.

30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the "centrality" of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. It concludes that, rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to officials familiar with the classified document.

Stupid Number 2: A presidency that thinks playground bullying and patronizing is the best way to have your leadership wishes come true.

...this year's gathering of world leaders demonstrated an unusually strident disrespect for the United States. The United States is perceived as weakened by a draining war in Iraq, while many of its adversaries feel emboldened with newfound oil wealth...

"Our peoples have a keen interest in the achievement of a larger measure of democracy, human rights and political reform," said Ahmed Aboul Gheit, foreign minister of Egypt, which receives more than $2 billion in annual aid from the United States. "However, we now see that some seek to impose these concepts by military force. They proceed from the assumption that their principles, values and culture are superior and thus worthy of being imposed on others."

Stupid Number Three: Pumping public money into a voting system that has demonstrated over and over that it is faulty, but continuing to do so since the manufacturer is a main contributor to Republican campaigns. The U.S. rests its claims to "democracy" on (ostensive) universal suffrage. This claim to being a democracy has been whittled away over the past six years. At some point, if these trends continue, we'll have to start calling our system of government something else.

From 2003 to 2005, some $3 billion flew out of the federal purse for equipment purchases. Nothing said “state of the art” like a paperless voting machine that electronically records and tallies votes with the tap of a touch screen. Election Data Services, a political consulting firm that specializes in redistricting, estimates that about 40 percent of registered voters will use an electronic machine in the coming elections.

One brand of machine leads in market share by a sizable margin: the AccuVote, made by Diebold Election Systems. Two weeks ago, however, Diebold suffered one of the worst kinds of public embarrassment for a company that began in 1859 by making safes and vaults.

Stupid Number Four: People who would rather lay waste to wooded land in hopes of eventually developing another strip mall, rather than allow an endangered species to flourish.

Over the past six months, landowners here have been clear-cutting thousands of trees to keep them from becoming homes for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker...

The agency issued a map marking 15 active woodpecker “clusters,” and announced it was working on a new one that could potentially designate whole neighborhoods of this town in southeastern North Carolina as protected habitat, subject to more-stringent building restrictions.

Hoping to beat the mapmakers, landowners swarmed City Hall to apply for lot-clearing permits. Treeless land, after all, would not need to be set aside for woodpeckers. Since February, the city has issued 368 logging permits, a vast majority without accompanying building permits.

The results can be seen all over town. Along the roadsides, scattered brown bark is all that is left of pine stands. Mayor Joan Kinney has watched with dismay as waterfront lots across from her home on Big Lake have been stripped down to sandy wasteland.

Stupid Number Five: What do you do when one of the most damaging events in the country's entire history continues to erode international and domestic support? You create an army of interrogators and pay a private company to do it. Bonus stupidity is that this is done with public funds, making us all complicit, and damning us with our silence.

The greatest one-year expansion of the Army's interrogation program, from 500 to 1,000 trainees, took place in 2005, the year after public disclosure of the scandals involving questioning of prisoners by Army intelligence personnel at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Today, with the Army introducing a new interrogation manual and Congress wrestling with legislation sought by the White House that would legalize the CIA's more aggressive questioning techniques, the number of people training to be interrogators is to rise again.

The Army is gearing up for the effort by hiring private companies to handle the training. Last month, the service awarded contracts that could grow to more than $50 million in the next five years to three private firms to provide additional instructors to the 18-week basic course in human-intelligence interrogation at Fort Huachuca.