Michele Bachmann? She's a TwitYa figure Dwight Eisenhower planned an invasion. Gotta be half smart, no? Abraham Lincoln? Helluva speaker. FDR? Made everybody believe things were gonna get better. Even the first George Bush knew how to fly a plane. Oh, sure, Ronald Reagan was doltish, but he could talk. He talked slow, but if you thought slow, he took you right along with him. Bush the sequel? Affable. Damned affable. See the progression? Maybe those of us who drive forklifts for a living aren't getting any smarter but, geez, the in-charge people get dumber every generation. Other than saying every single thing I ever expected the first black president to say, Obama's a dud, incapable of inspiring anything beyond easily won second-hand triumph among people who thought voting for a black president was a courageous act. I think Harvard must be easier than it used to be, or maybe the curriculum is just so fragmented these days you don't have to be really good at anything except attitude. Sarah Palin, of course, is an obvious fool, the sort of person who should be running the early shift at a particularly unpopular pancake house. She's a celebrity, not a leader. Listening to Republican candidate Michele Bachmann convinces me that the level of intelligence up there at the top is thinning out like the air in Denver. History of your own country, Michele? Duh, it's America, right? Economics? Uh, put the rich folks in charge, like they're not already. We need jobs. The people who live on my block need rent money, and yes, people on my block rent, most of them. Average rent? Probably $600 a month, and we can't make that, a lot of us. The tea party? An entire movement for dummies, and Bachmann owes them her shoes. Beautiful.
Jobs. Not part-time, no-benefits, non-union jobs that send the boss's annoying too-skinny kid to arrogance camp and our kids to the crack house. Jobs. Real jobs. Thirty-year jobs. Pride jobs. We'll go every day, though at this point the work ethic has probably lost an entire generation due to the fact that the connection between work and reward is now frayed like an old extension cord. Jobs. Work. Work for the high school graduates, and yeah, I know the military is still hiring. In fact, due to the lack of jobs in working-class communities, the military can afford to be picky. We've been doing this right versus left thing for a long time now, and the jobs keep going away, and there's no raise again this year. The Republicans want you to have a minimum-wage job and a gun. The Democrats want you to have a welfare check and a compassionate understanding of what it means to be a transvestite, and nobody seems to care how much you make a week. But, hey, who cares about your paycheck? Eat your ideology. Be right-wing, poor and proud. Be left-wing, poor and compassionate. First, be poor. That's the new motto. And that's what we get to eat — slogans. We get hatred to eat and celebrity gossip to drink and listening to Michele Bachmann for a job and the Indian casino as hope for the future. You want to see countries run on ideology? Take a look at those dimly-lit little corners of the crude oil world, where the Quran is the source of all wisdom and life sucks for everyone except a dozen princes who get to hang apricot-sized diamonds on their illiterate 14-year-old wives. It isn't that far-right ideology doesn't work, and it isn't that far-left ideology doesn't work. It isn't that communism doesn't work, and it isn't that capitalism doesn't work. It's that extremism doesn't work. Extremism is best peddled by the not-too-bright to the not-too-hopeful Which means there's plenty of work for Michele Bachmann. To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2011 BY CREATORS.COM 
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