You Can't Fix Stupid

As a supporter of Barack Obama’s candidacy for president, I have been in more than a few scrapes with a members of the Christian right on websites like Crosswalk – which offers a public e-forum for all sorts of topics including politics.

Anyhoo, when trying to engage in a civil conversation over a recent quote by Obama (e.g. that one about his grandmother as a “typical white person”), one individual I’ve been speaking to offered the following after I posted Obama’s interview quote in its full context:

“The quote you provided has been sanitized. A key part is missing. You would have know this if you had been able to overcome your reaction to absolve [Obama] of anything, no matter how ignorant. The missing part is where [Obama] tried to attribute typical white people's irrational reaction to the mere sight of a black man to their breeding. According to [Obama], racist tendencies have been "bred" into whites. Normally one would need to attend a KKK meeting or a sermon at the Trinity Church of Christ to hear such ignorance.”

To which I replied:

You mean this” missing” part?

“But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, you know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred in our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.” – Barack Obama on WIP Radio (March 20, 2008)

I then go onto say:

“When Obama uses the term "bred" it's a metaphor. He is not talking about breeding in the biological sense; Obama's speaking about cultural experiences. Plus, has it occurred to you that Obama is half-white himself? For him to bash racially bash whites would be as pointless as Obama doing the same against blacks. “

Not that all Crosswalk users (like the one above) are this dumb. In fact, most seem to have understood what Obama was driving at in his interview.

Yet like any other candidate, this is precisely the kind of ignorance Obama will have to deal with: morons who are apparently incapable of thinking higher than a 6^th-grade level, nor reading anything in context, and are perfectly willing to swallow anything Fox "News" (save Brian Kilmeade and Chris Wallace) spoonfeeds them.

But as Ron White says, “you can’t fix stupid.”