So who are the people that insist (somewhat shrilly, I might add) that being an unqualified, ignorant outsider is the perfect qualification for a job?

These are the future unhireables, the folks who are vaguely aware that success on the job market is increasingly reserved for the highly qualified and the very educated. They find solace in a fantasy that one day somebody will appreciate them precisely because they have no knowledge, no sophistication, no connections, and no qualifications.

To a large extent, the pool of presidential candidates represents a fantasy that gives solace to those who are in danger of being left behind and slipping into the role of lumpenized unhireables.

In the soporific news of the month, the painfully boring discussions of whether Fiorina was a good CEO keep raging on.

The point of these debates eludes me entirely. Let’s say she was the best CEO known to humanity. So what? How would that make her more qualified to perform an entirely different set of duties?

By participating in the debates as to whether Fiorina was a good CEO or Carson a good doctor, we are allowing the congenitally stupid among our compatriots to define the terms of discussion and colonize the public space. We are letting the most lost and confused among us have an impact that they do not deserve to have.

The problem with Fiorina, Trump and Carson is not how well or how badly they performed in their professions. The problem is that, politically, they are rank, arrogant amateurs who can only appeal to those who are too intellectually limited to understand the complexities of the modern world.

Remember, the moment you let somebody else define the terms of the conversation, you are halfway down the road to losing.

Russians have now installed surface-to-air missiles in Syria and brought over combat aircraft armed with air-to-air missiles.

“But this is all to battle ISIS, right?” John Kerry begged. “This is all about you helping us to defeat ISIS, right? Please, tell me it’s all about ISIS. Pretty please, somebody?”

Of course, it is painfully obvious to everybody that one can’t fight ISIS with surface-to-air missiles. It is also painfully obvious to everybody whom one can fight in Syria with combat aircraft  and surface-to-air missiles. Hope springs eternal, though, and the White House keeps clinging on to the belief that if you shut your eyes really tight, unpleasant, scary things will disappear.

Few things disgust me more than professional relatives, people who, in the absence of any achievements of their own, milk the fame of a relative for unearned respect.  Here is one such creature:

Aleida Guevara, Che Guevara’s daughter and the director of the Studies Center named after her father, has criticized the call from the authorities for Cubans to attend the Masses that will take place during Pope Francis’s visit to Cuba.

It is undeniable that the Catholic Church sucks, the Pope sucks, and greeting the Pope in Cuba is one big joke. This message, however, should be delivered by anybody but this woman who has turned the title of “Che Guevara’s daughter” into a source of profit, attention, and adulation.

I will never forget how this horrible, nasty creature praised the Cuban medical care system in Michael Moore’s movie. I was shocked by the shamelessness of this white woman who was coddled and spoiled rotten by the party while the overwhelmingly black population of the island was abused and pushed around by the so-called doctors in dirty, smelly barns called hospitals and was forced to sell their bodies to Western tourists in return for a life-saving asthma inhaler or a vial of insulin. (I saw these people and talked with them, so arguing with me about this makes no sense.)

I’m sure Che Guevara – who, with all his faults, was an earnest believer in the revolution – would have little cause to celebrate if he saw how fat his daughter grew, sucking out the blood of the Cuban people and making grand pronouncements in his name.

It’s easy for Aleida Guevara to criticize the miserable, debased Cubans for whom God is the only hope in their sad, hopeless lives. Aleida’s god is the party that allows her to run a nifty little business of deriving profit from the memory of a father who, when he was alive, didn’t give a crap about her. Of course, she doesn’t need any other sort of divine intervention. The Cubans who don’t have famous dead relatives they could peddle, though, really do.

We were driving to a party at the house of a local family. As we turned into their syreet, I spotted a car with a sticker supporting Ben Carson for president.

“Oh God,” I started to fret. “What if these crazy people are going to the same place we are?”

I shouldn’t have worried, though. These are wealthy people we are visiting. They even have a very chic live band performing. There aren’t likely to be any Carson supporters here.

And the most insane sentence I have heard all week (and mind you, it’s a week of a Republican debate) also appeared in the NYTIMES:

Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, called Pope Francis to brief him on the “ongoing Israeli aggression in occupied East Jerusalem, and particularly against Al Aqsa Mosque.”

This is the only time the Pope appears in the article, and the reasons for his appearance remain forever shrouded in mystery. The words “brief” and “particularly” are especially mystifying.

From the New York Times:

Israeli settlers have long asserted that the Palestinians are an invented people and that the West Bank’s real name is Judea and Samaria.

Statements of this kind tend to drive me up a wall. All nations are imaginary communities, all ethnic and national groups are invented, all places in the world are likely to have had a bizillion and one different names throughout history.

Saying this sort of thing is as idiotic as announcing with a look of somebody invested with a higher knowledge, “Did you hear? Those Palestinians have heads. That’s so freaky.” Of course, Palestinians have heads just like everyone else does but this inconvenient fact is omitted.

Every attempt of a nation-state (or an aspiring nation-state) to derive legitimacy from being less invented and less historically recent than somebody else are risible and doomed to failure.

This is the 21 century, people. The only way the nation-state can prove its legitimacy at this point is by offering a high standard of living to its citizens. Look at Syrians. They turn around and leave without any consideration for the national mythology of who lived where first, second and last. And they are absolutely right. Keeping people even somewhat attached is hard enough even for the nation-states that are offering a lot more than boring old fairy-tales of nationalism.

Two weeks ago, the White House issued “a stern warning” to Russia not to intervene militarily in Syria’s civil war.

A week later, President Obama condemned Russia for sending weapons and troops to Syria as “a move doomed to failure.”

Yesterday, the White House reversed two weeks’ worth of policy and  reached out to Russia with an offer to cooperate on Syria. The efforts to help anti-Assad rebels were scrapped in favor of propping up Assad with Russia’s help.

For several years, Russia has been demanding that the US drop its opposition to dictator Assad. Today, the US is begging Putin to help out with putting in place what has been Russia’s plan all along.

It is, of course, an absolute mystery why Russians openly and viciously ridicule Obama and call him, among many very racist things, weak.

P.S. Also, please observe how Obama’s foreign policy is identical to that exposed by Donald Trump during the debate on Wednesday. “I’m confident I can have a good working relationship with Putin. I have no idea how but I know I can. I just know if I talk to him, all will be fine.” Identical.

I find it absolutely disgusting, vicious, vomit – producing and hateful that a huge army of pathetic losers is now crawling out of the woodwork to argue that Carly Fiorina’s achievements are not that great and she wasn’t even a real secretary anyway.

The only people who have the right to comment on Fiorina’s achievement are those who have achieved more. Everybody else sounds like a sore loser of massive proportions when he (it’s always some underemployed fellow who does it) begins to assign grades to people with hugely successful careers.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a victim of his own journalistic talent. His articles are meticulously researched, never rushed, always supported by mountains of evidence, and deeply insightful.

In the age of snappy soundbites, though, these skills are not that valued. People skim the headers and write responses to the articles based on what they assume the journalist must be saying. And then Coates has to beg people at least to read what he wrote before opining on it.

It’s not that surprising that careless, stupid journalists proliferate since the readers can’t deal with more nuanced, complex writing.