HOW DUMB DO HAVE TO BE?

Imagine someone gives you a million dollars. No strings, no taxes, just a whole bunch of free money for you to do anything you want. Sweet, no? How dumb would you have to be to screw that up? Maybe lose it on the bus, set fire to it playing with matches or some equally idiotic thing. There are those among us that stupid, maybe more than we originally figured. Not much to be done about that. So, the best approach to those people is not to give them that million dollars, or trust them with your own million.

Which brings us to people who screw things up that you'd think were impossible to screw up. Take our giant financial institutions, those multi-billion dollar enterprises that line the canyons of Wall Street and the broad boulevards of America's major cities. These companies have been, for the most part, in business for a very long time, and have been making money hand over fist, creating and managing vast wealth and fueling our huge economy. And within these corporations there are certain sound business practices to follow that will ensure the continuation of making profits for the shareholders of these publicly held companies.

So you go to work for one of these places, learn the ropes, apply yourself and climb the corporate ladder. And every step of the way is a learning process, with skilled and wise teachers sharing the benefits of their experience and insight with you so that you know what's what as you advance. You heed their sage advice, work hard and someday you find yourself in a corner office with your name on the door in gold letters, proclaiming that you are the boss. Top of the corporate food chain, the CEO of Megamoney, Incorporated. Pretty heady stuff indeed, but a humbling task as well.

You are entrusted with many billions of dollars of other people's money, responsible for a large workforce and are now one of the caretakers of America's economy. This is no time to start acting like a sailor in Times Square with a month's pay in his pocket. You know better, you were trained well and you have a lot of people relying on you. And, truth be told, the company almost runs itself from long standing successful practices already in place. You're there to make sure these practices continue. You are being paid magnificently to do so. You are not being asked to invent a damned thing, the blueprints are right in front of you at all times and there's trained experts at your beck and call to help you out. It's almost impossible to screw up in this controlled environment.

But not completely impossible. You can be a real dumb son of a bitch and burn down the candy store so that not only you, but countless other people are screwed. You can be so dumb to do the nearly impossible, taking everybody's candy away, and you can be dumber still and try to blame somebody else, forgetting those gold letters on the door spelling out your name and not somebody else's. Okay, so now it's been revealed you're dumb as a fence post, you probably just go away quietly and hope the next guy can straighten out the mess you've made.

Unless you're super-dumb. That's when you remind the company that they owe you $20 million dollars more in severance pay, your Golden Parachute. Never mind that you signed a contract promising effective performance and reasonable success and promptly violated that oath, you want your go-away money, at which point the Board of Directors starts going over your contract with a fine-tooth comb and perhaps the Federal and State District Attorneys start doing the same with your business records, finding all sorts of broken laws and now you're wearing shiny new bracelets and doing a perp-walk for the cameras. It is at this point that the height of your stupidity is revealed, and you have attained Uber Dumb, the very zenith of idiocy, the Nirvana of Numbskullery.

But don't feel too bad, Mr. Felon CEO, you're in good company these days, with many a CEO of previously solid firms getting arrested, sued and imprisoned. And as a shining example you have Bush The Younger, President of America, a candy store the likes of which the world has never seen before, a playground of unprecedented freedom, opportunity and success. Yet for 8 years the Numbskull-in-Chief has been earnestly playing with matches, trying to burn it down while the rest of the world marvels at his supreme idiocy, wondering exactly how you can screw up something as golden as America. But Bush the Younger presses on in his quest to do the impossible, pulling off blunder after blunder to impress those who said it couldn't be done.

So far America has proven to be Bush-proof, but only barely. There are some among us who would like to see how far we can push the envelope, dumb-wise, and would like to give John McCain a shot to continue Bush The Younger's destructive policies for 4 more years to see if the Republic can stand it. While that may be an interesting academic field test of how idiot-proof is our nation, some feel that enough is enough and maybe we ought to go back to electing smart guys as our leaders. How dumb do you have to be?