Thursday, May 31, 2007

Kakistocracy

I often watch the spelling bee finals just to see if I know any of the words. Usually the answer is no, but one year they used several yiddish words, which I indeed knew, so anything is possible.
This year, in an effort to humanize the finalists, ABC had little interviews with them. The lone girl in the final seven, Isabel Jacobson, age 14, of Madison, Wisconsin, was asked her three favorite words. I have forgotten two of them, but one is now one of my favorites – kakistocracy.
Kakistocracy – Rule by the least able or least principled of citizens. A form of government where the people least qualified to control the government are the people who control it. From the Greek kakos, bad.
When your children ask you what kind of government the United States has, don’t say democracy or republic, say kakistocracy – it’s the most accurate description possible this century.
Future historians can refer to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, and Gonzales as the Flying Kakistocrats.

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