Educating Congress/OTP

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Hugh Hewitt had another (of course) insightful post yesterday that I believe it would serve well every reader of this blog to read in full. Here’s a sample:

Now imagine if you didn’t read blogs and didn’t read books. Picture all the things that you know now that you wouldn’t know if you left your news gathering to the tender mercies of the mainstream media’s editorial decisions. You’d probably be unaware of the ghastly fate that awaits 200 French automobiles each evening at the hands of rampaging “youths.” You’d definitely be unaware of the youths’ affiliation with certain religious practices.

If all your news came from newspapers, you wouldn’t understand how numerous, determined and flat-out crazy our enemies are. You wouldn’t know how widespread the phenomenon of Radical Islam is because the New York Times, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal don’t report it. Every now and then you would stumble over an editorial or op-ed piece highlighting a particularly pathological incident, but you would have no concept of how massive the problem is.

AND THIS IS WHERE WE CLOSE THE LOOP. I’ve long wondered how our leaders can be so unserious about the fight we’re in given the existential stakes. Now I get it – they just don’t understand the stakes. The newspapers haven’t told them that we’re in a fight for our lives. Lord knows the intelligence agencies don’t get it. And now we know the congressmen themselves take either no or precious little initiative to educate themselves.

Hugh, of course, is much more gentlemanly than I in his assessment of our congresscritters’ ignorance of threats facing the United States, the threat of Islamism among them. I would simply say that, regardless of individual congresscritters’ basic intelligence, such ignorance amounts to willfull criminal ignorance, stupidity.

But perhaps these stupid congresscritters can be taught. If so, it’d best be done by people like Hugh. I have little patience for fools. I’m more persuaded that a tea party might just be a better idea, sometimes. *sigh*