Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures." -- Daniel Webster
Monday, June 14, 2010 :::
It's almost a week since Alvin Greene was nominated by South Carolina Democrats to run for the US Senate. While I'm certainly not guaranteeing that nothing interesting will turn up about how he got elected, there's a good chance he won because his name was listed first on the ballot and a bunch of idiots and saps, having bought into the naive mantra that voting is in and of itself a good thing, knowingly cast entirely uninformed ballots. There will be people who call for different rules on ballot ordering because of this, and that wouldn't be a bad idea except insofar as it prevents people from learning the broader lesson here.
(This is likely to be worse problem for the Democrats than for the Republicans, but to a significant extent it's a part of our national secular religion and pervades most of the political spectrum.)