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An interesting opinion piece in today's Madison Capital Times takes dead aim at something most journalists and pundits would rather not talk about:

A year ago at Thanksgiving, I was still reeling from the presidential election just weeks before. Most sobering for me was the survey where 70 percent of prospective Bush supporters said they would not support Bush if he had misled them about weapons of mass destruction prior to declaring war in Iraq, opposed the International Criminal Court, or taken various other positions - all of which he clearly had done or taken. The gap between known important facts and people's working knowledge of them shook me up.

You read that correctly. It's not a misprint. The writer is actually placing the blame for the re-election of George Bush squarely where it belongs — on the American public's ignorance of events.

What makes the statement so surprising is that the American media reflexively genuflects at the altar of the American public. We are the most wise, the most caring, the most informed, the most generous people ever to have graced the earth. Saying otherwise is virtual sacrilege.

But having flogged the sacred cow, the writer goes on to say how encouraged she is that America's awareness of events has sharpened over the last year. By the end of the column, she has fully atoned, paying the obligatory homage to "the practical good sense of the American public."

Whatever goes wrong in our society never seems to be our fault. It is always them — the Republicans, or the Democrats, the greedy corporate executives, the corrupt officials, and on and on.

With apologies to Gertrude Stein, in a democracy, there's no "them" there. We, the people, are ultimately responsible for everything from our neglected infrastructure to our exclusionary health care system to the war in Iraq.

The sad fact is, "the practical good sense of the American public" put this administration and its pack of wolves into power. Twice.

And all the while, the media pretends not to notice that the populace has no clothes.