Well, KABOOM! That made my head explode. It never occurred to me, I don’t know why, that we had non-senile elected officials (when Joe Biden was asked the same question, he reportedly answered, “Coffee”) who don’t know the basic history of the nation they are supposed to lead and worse, don’t see that as a problem.

I know that I am a bit obsessed with Presidential history (but my knowledge of it helps me figure out what is either going on or should be going on almost every day). I’m reasonable, though; I believe that a citizen is at least minimally informed if he or she can identify the significance and place in the U.S. timeline of just five POTUSes: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson (the Louisiana Purchase), Honest Abe (the Civil War), Woodrow Wilson (The Great War) and FDR (The Great Depression and World War II). Knowing those five isn’t enough to qualify such a citizen as sufficiently educated or civically literate, but it is a fair baseline that suggests they know something about the unique country in which they live.

However, for a member of Congress to lack even that much perspective and context and still presume to make laws and propose policy is unconscionable and disqualifying, for two reasons. First, it means such a member—okay, let’s call a Chu a Chu—doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and second, it means she lacks the requisite sense of responsibility and intellectual curiosity to know what she doesn’t know and know why she should know it.

In the case of Chu, her ignorance is bewildering. She graduated from high school, has a college degree (majoring in mathematics), and has Ph.D. degree in psychology. She taught psychology in the Los Angeles Community College District for 20 years. The fact that she never heard of Woodrow Wilson (the second Worst President Ever) or at least doesn’t know beans about him is an indictment of the U.S. Congress and the nation’s educational system.

And, of course, Rep. Chu herself. You have to pass an exam to be a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant, a hairdresser, but we let civically ignorant people run for Congress so civically ignorant citizens can elect them and we all end up with incompetents. I am guessing that a mandatory civics and history literacy test to qualify someone to run for public office would be ruled unconstitutional, but a state could offer a voluntary test. Newt Gingrich types would ace it, and Rep. Chu-types would refuse to take it, giving all a strong indication of their limitations.

You know. Morons.

Some additional thoughts:

1. Defenders of Chu are attacking Bessent for asking the question, arguing that Woodrow Wilson has nothing to do with the Iran War. I agree it was a smart-aleck “gotcha” question, but any half-educated member of Congress should have been able to answer it, and the fact that Chu could not “is what it is,” and what it is is horrifying.

2. Give Chu credit for answering the question, though that may mean that she isn’t even cognizant of how badly her ignorance reflects on her. “Hey, so I don’t know the history of the nation I serve in Congress! What’s the big deal?”

3. Chu’s rendition of “Don’t Know Much About History” pushed out of first place the second most ignorant question from a member of Congress this week. During yesterday’s House Homeland Security Committee hearing, Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) accused Secretary Mullin of heading a racist agency, saying, “You know what’s racist? The fact that every detainee in Delaney Hall is a person of color.”

Somebody tell her…