I Want A President Who Is Smarter Than A Fifth Grader

There is something I've had on my mind that I've wanted to express all day, but I wasn't around anyone who was going to take me seriously ( it's a bad sign when you are surrounded by the great unwashed all day).

We ask people who are arguably much, much smarter than the average citizen, at least these days (and I will include your president GW here, because even if the conventional wisdom pegs him as a retard, he is STILL smarter than most of the populace, however you want to slice that) to "dumb down" when they run for office.

Putting the limitations of having an average IQ aside, it is very possible to communicate in a meaningful way with someone who has less intellectual firepower about complex issues and ideas if they are presented in a manner that shows a logical progression at a speed that allows proper mental digestion by the recipient.

But we don't want that. We want to be experts on the professional draft pick prospects of HIGH SCHOOL seniors who are four years away from being eligible to play in the NFL. We want to be experts on the origin, care and feeding of hand rolled cigars. We want to become intimately familiar with the intricacies of human growth hormone and its possible use or abuse by professional baseball players. We want to memorize the property settlement details from Shaquille O'Neal's divorce so that we can accurately debate them at a cocktail party in the future. We want to be oenophiles capable of selecting the best wine even when we are subjected to a blind taste test.

I am constantly amazed at the amount of minutiae people master that will have absolutely no effect on the lives they live. Meanwhile, they are often prone to base their knowledge of political proceedings on the last three sound bites they heard while they were flipping the channel between a Kobi Bryant jump shot and a Roger Clemens fastball.

I just needed to get that out.