A government shutdown and other serious issues loom and what is our congresswoman doing? She is getting ushered out of a Denver theater for vaping, being groped by her date and behaving like an obnoxious middle-schooler.

Lauren Boebert and the others in Congress like her – the jacketless Ohioan, the blonde Georgian, the pompadoured Floridian, the speaker to name a few – summon the words (paraphrased) of the great Freedonian statesman, Rufus T. Firefly, “They may talk like idiots, and they may look like idiots, but don’t let that you fool you: They really are idiots.”

A tad harsh? Maybe, but even former Republican House member Liz Cheney used that term when she recently declared, “We have to stop electing idiots.”

There is a name for this form of government – kakistocracy. The word comes from two Greek words that mean governance by numpties. Elect the least competent, the most ignorant, the most unfit citizens to govern and you got yourself a kakistocracy.

Give the most unfit, most ignorant, most megalomaniacal, and most narcissistic person the top job in government and you have a kakistocratic autocracy.

But going back to Cheney’s comment, one of the great opening lines in all of fiction is from the novel Forrest Gump, when the title character/narrator opens the narrative with, “Let me say this: bein (sic) a idiot is no box of chocolates.”

And neither is being governed by them (idiots that is, not chocolates).

Kevin Devine

Durango