“Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself,” quipped Mark Twain.
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| EARL OF TAINT |
Issues & Insights . . ."That’s in the same category as the concern of Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., that stationing 8,000 U.S. military personnel on Guam would cause the small island to “become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.”
Currently serving Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, once proclaimed that the U.S. Constitution is 400 years old. And as a member of the House Science Committee, during a visit to the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Lab, she asked a NASA scientist whether the Mars Pathfinder probe had photographed the flag that astronaut Neil Armstrong left behind in 1969. Armstrong had, of course, left the flag on the moon, not on Mars. No manned spacecraft has visited Mars.". . .
"A mental status exam by an expert offers an assessment of cognitive abilities, memory and quality of thought processes. It includes assessments of alertness, speech, behavior, awareness of environment, mood, affect, rationality of thought processes, appropriateness of thought content (presence of delusions, hallucinations, or phobias), memory, ability to perform simple calculations, judgment (“If you found a letter on the ground in front of a mailbox, what would you do with it?”), and higher reasoning, such as the ability to interpret proverbs abstractly (“A stitch in time saves nine.”).
"An intelligence test measures various parameters that are thought to correlate with academic or financial achievement. Every politician need not be a genius, but I’d like the ones who represent me to be smarter than the average person on the street.
"The journalist and satirist H.L. Mencken observed, “Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.”
"Testing might help us to weed out a few idiots. Getting rid of the scoundrels and poltroons will have to wait."
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