This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

I have written before about the phrase in the headline.  It applies especially to politics these days.

Not to the appropriate differences of opinion between Democrats and Republicans – or Independents.  Differing views are a natural part of the political process, though one hopes that smart legislators would find a way, at least on occasion, to bridge differences and find middle ground.

But there are stupid folks on all sides of the political aisle.

So it was that I read another good column by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal.

Here is a key excerpt:

“Connected are Ginni Thomas’s texts to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the days after the 2020 election.  They capture two characteristics of radicals on both sides, now and maybe forever.

“The first is that they have extreme respect for their own emotions:  If they feel it, it’s true.  The other is that they tend to be stupid, in the sense of having little or no historical knowledge or the sense of proportion such knowledge brings.”

Ginni Thomas is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and made service difficult for him by getting heavily involved in efforts to promote the fallacy that Donald Trump won the most recent presidential election.

Note the phrase, “If they feel it, it’s true.”

That’s a key problem in politics, if not life in general, these days.  If you believe something, then it’s true, regardless of the facts of the matter that, if considered, could prompt you to re-think your biases. 

Back to the headline in this blog:  You can’t fix stupid.

Ginni Thomas is only the latest example of it.