It is no secret that I think very little of our elected officials and that is ALL of them…..they are as worthless as tits on a boar…..I have seldom heard more moronic diatribes from so-called professionals than those coming out of our capital of Washington……
And then I saw this report from the Sunlight Foundation…….
If you’ve ever felt stupider after watching Congress bicker about some issue for a couple of hours, you’re not wrong. The nation’s lawmakers are, in fact, dumbing themselves down, according to a new report by the Sunlight Foundation.
An analysis weighing congressional speeches against the Flesch-Kincaid scale—best known as that numerical score that tells you how smart you are when you run the word count diagnostic in your word processing software—reveals that legislators speak at a 10.6 grade level.
That’s down from 11.5 just seven years ago. In the span of less than a decade, Congress’ rhetorical skills have receded nearly a full grade, the Sunlight Foundation discovered. The report readily admits the unreliability of the Flesch-Kincaid test, which grades language on complexity, not clarity. But it is still a decent metric for judging the quality of one’s words.
That quality is declining on Capitol Hill, and it’s a bipartisan effort. Democrats in the 112th Congress speak at a 10.8 grade level, with Republicans declaiming at a 10.5 mark. But the GOP could take some solace in the knowledge that a reading of Democratic scores showed that the further left a member of Congress is ideologically, the more his or her grade tends to decline.
Still, it’s not entirely a measurement of innate dumbness. Maybe, the Sunlight report argues, the drop in Congressional perspicacity could be attributed to more floor speeches being delivered in campaign-speak and Internet-friendly sound bites:
I wish I could say that there is light at the end of this tunnel….but alas…….that bulb burnt out years ago….
Reblogged this on affliate marketing .
Thanx!
I can’t wait till the time when they’ll just be yelling “fuck you” at each other.
Hansi and maybe a fist fight or two or evenb a chair thrown at an adversary…..at least all that is honest and not the crap we have now….
This is probably a factor of the anti-education, anti-intellectual crowd that seems to be filling ranks of Congress these days.
SO true….and I still hold that these asshats need to know at least the most rudimentary civics before they can run…at least show that they understand the Constitution and not just use it as a political prop…..