Is The Glass Half-Empty?

Over at The Right Coast, Maimon Schwarzschild ponders on Things To Be Depressed About, asking who is right, optimists or pessimists and more pessimists? ht: Instapundit

I gotta go with Scott and VDH on this one. It's not even close.

You know, the really bad thing about reality is that it has a way of catching up to people who refuse to face it, and then smacking them in the chops until they do. As my dad said, "Life is hard, but it's a lot harder if you're stupid."

America as a nation is stupid. We elected a charismatic, attractive, apparently-intelligent person to the President, ignoring the fact that the man had very little experience actually running things and making decisions... and the experience he did have wasn't illustrative of brilliance as a leader or manager (his management of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge oversaw the spending of almost $150 million! with no apparent quantitative results - no improvement in child or school performance). We could have elected a man with tremendous experience, and proven leadership and management abilities, but as I said, America as a nation is stupid.

Now we have this resultant mess of the economy, which a strong, confident hand on the wheel could have prevented. We have trillion-dollar deficits stretching out as far as the eye can see. We have a Congress that is too lazy to actually read legislation before passing it... and then too stupidly arrogant to realize that passing unconstitutional bills of attainder are no substitute for due diligence. We have insulted our strongest allies, left important friends who trusted us at our word hanging by themselves, and kowtowed to our sworn enemies, earning not peace but a dangerous lack of respect that will foment more trouble around the world. But give the Obama Administration credit for one thing: we did all of this in 60 days! Yep... we made history alright, and let's pray that it's the history we wanted instead of the second coming of Jimmy Carter, or worse.

We needed the best and brightest, but instead we elected the glib and facile, the popular kids in high school who got all the dates but ended up working where they could use their connections rather than innate ability to go farther... and we are going to pay for it.