"Everyone is entitled to be stupid, but some abuse the privilege"

I was watching a show recently where they were reviewing some of the worst shows ever on TV.

My Mother the Car, Cop Rock, The Jerry Springer Show and the list went on and on.

Hundreds of millions of dollars to produce and most of them didn't even last a season.

So called experts who were paid very well because "they had their pulse on the consumer and knew what the viewer wanted to see"

And most of these people kept right on working following one failure after another and some of them made an entire career based on one success.

My initial thought was how could these networks be so stupid?

Didn't anyone of these execs see how stupid some of these ideas were?

How could have anyone in charge actually let these shows on the air?

But then I began to think of where we have come as a country over the same period of time.

We have spent hundreds of billions on ideas that were just as bad.

Some of our elected officials have made careers based on bad decisions and some of them never even had one success as did some of their TV counterparts.

The problem is that we seem to set the bar so low and have allowed mediocrity to become the gold standard.

Scandals, improprieties, or a total disregard of the law, it does not seem to matter as we just keep voting these same people into office.

Every four to six year we are promised change or we are told that things are going to be different and we take the bait, hook, line and sinker.

So we continue to spend hundreds of billions on military aid in other countries but can't find any funding to take care of our returning veterans. (Wasn't it just a few years ago when the Walter Reed scandal broke that all those in office said things were going to be different).

Our infrastructure is collapsing across the country and we can't find the money to support it but our government is going to soon be a majority shareholder in numerous banks, financial institutions and even GM.

We have money to finance bonuses for executives that were at the helm during the worst financial collapse in history but we do not have money to properly pay our teachers who are our only hope for our children and our future.

We continue to write checks for entitlements and bailouts instead of developing work programs to put the unemployed to work.

God forbid we should revisit things that actually worked to get us out of the last Depression.

But things will not change as long as we show some intelligence when we go into the voting booth.

As it stands now we only have ourselves to blame.

While everyone is entitled to be stupid, for too long too many of us have been abusing the privilege.