Now here is a nice way to start Monday, a nice one-line question that is a fabulous come back.
So the context is this – a discussion on Financial Regulation.
Discussing it is Barney Frank, a well-known Democrat who was elected to the US House of Representatives from 1981 until 2013 and also the co-sponsor of the 2010 Dodd–Frank Act that brought about a sweeping reform of the U.S. financial industry. Clearly when under the previous watch the idea that mortgages could be given to people even when it was clear that they could never ever afford to pay it back, and that this debt was then repackaged as AAA rated debt, was all a rather strong indicator that financial regulation was desperately needed.
Defending the quite frankly (no pun intended) indefensible, we have sitting on the other side of the table conservative commentator S. E. Cupp.
Barney Frank is outlining the choice … do we roll back to the unregulated position or do we stick to what we now have, and makes the observation that while Obama will of course ensure the regulation remains in place, he can also see that the Republican desire is to roll back all the regulations, and so 2016 will bring a clear choice.
S.E. Cup then points out that this is a little bit of a false argument because those are not the only two options, and that there are smart Republicans …
… and at that point Barney Frank chips in with a beautiful one-liner that takes the wind right out of her sails … boom at the 1:44 mark … I love it.
Enjoy (or not if you happen to be a Republican) …
Myths
It can of course be tempting to think that “they”, the folks on the other side of the fence, are indeed stupid, and this is perhaps a rather popular myth that prevails in many different types of communities and not simply within a political arena. For example, it might indeed be tempting for the non-religious to label those that are religious as “stupid”, and in a similar manner, as we see here by reading the comments under the YouTube clip, many truly believe that the Republicans are indeed stupid, but it is of course not actually like that at all, and while the above clip is of course a entertaining bit of political theatre, we all deep down know that regardless of political or religious belief, you will find humans that are smart along with humans that are not so smart.
Often we align for cultural and emotional reasons with a particular political or religious slant, and not because any of the ideas presented have been demonstrated to be true, and so we can all (no exceptions) be prone to making bad choices that manifest as an embrace of bad ideas.
So while the surface position might be one in which “they” are stupid, a far more interesting deeper question to ponder over is this, “Why have smart intelligent humans done something completely daft, what exactly is going on here?”. Sometimes the answer might indeed be down to them embracing bad unproven ideas, but that might not always be true, what if it is us, what if we are the ones who have got it wrong? Coming to terms with that being a possibility is the real challenge here.