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PROGRAMMING NOTE: I’m taking a mini-vacation starting today. I’ll be back at the desk on Monday. Crash Course will return Tuesday morning.

When I was 14 years old, the president of the United States was the dumbest man on the planet. 

The message was inescapable. Leaving the television on after “South Park” ended meant hearing it from Jon Stewart. In book stores, desk calendars full of presidential malapropisms and gaffes were displayed on tables near the front door. If I called my factory foreman grandfather, he’d pace the floor and rant about the commander in chief for hours. On the internet, liberals and progressives were building a separate media ecosystem just to call George W. Bush dumb as a brick. 

It’s an idea that’s stuck around in left-of-center spaces, painting conservative politicians as ignorant above all else. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. Bush and his cronies got almost everything they wanted before the extreme unpopularity of his actions washed the Republican Party out of power. The GOP regrouped during the Obama years, looking to finish a conservative project started decades before. Under Donald Trump, they’ve nearly done it.  These people are no dummies, but they think John Q. Public is. 

If you need proof, just look to Mike Johnson. The House speaker is more than willing to defend blatant lies and misdirections from Trump, not because he believes what the president is saying, but because he thinks we will. He knows that a depleted or partisan media can’t effectively call him on his BS (and that there’s almost no consequences when they do). Earlier this year, Johnson repeatedly mischaracterized Trump’s role in the partial government shutdown. On Wednesday, he jumped into Trump’s fray with the pope, citing “just war doctrine" as a defense of the ongoing war in Iran.

“It’s a very well-settled matter of Christian theology,” he said.

Even the most cursory reading on this “doctrine” reveals that Johnson is full of it. Posited by Augustine of Hippo and built up by Thomas Aquinas, the theory holds that there are times when Christians can be justified in advocating for or participating in wars of self-defense. But both men made it clear that a “just war” must be declared by a lawful authority. Aquinas himself lays that out as his first condition. In the United States, that would be Congress, the branch of the government with the authority to declare war. 

The pope is still right on this one. The war with Iran is unjust and a travesty. Johnson knows that his point is bunk, but he wants to go to war anyway. His flimsy counterargument doesn’t come from ignorance. It comes from a bone-deep belief that his audience will uncritically swallow whatever he says and no one with clout who disagrees will bother to bring him to task.

What do you think? They aren’t actually this dim, right? Sound off in the comments.

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The president's blasphemy exposes the truth about the Christian right. Read more.

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