Regardless of whether you are a Senator Richard Burr fan (Republican from NC), it’s nice to see that almost universally the adjective used to describe his attitude in his participation in the March 11th 2014 Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging exchange with Canadian physician Dr. Danielle Martin was SMUG. (Search Richard Burr smug!)
It’s an apt description because smug, as defined by Google is having or showing an excessive pride in oneself. If nothing else, one comes away with the distinct impression that Richard Burr’s performance was all about himself, and that if asked what Dr. Martin said, that he’d have difficulty conveying the same.
Senator Burr is a primitive in this respect, less able to disguise his smugness than other more polished or schooled members of Congress and therefore helps put a face on what bothers me about our lawmakers, their seeming isolation from anyone around them besides their great notion of “oneself.”
It is this hyper-focus on self that perhaps help explains why Congress, the House and Senate, seems more a collection of individuals than of a body operating in any seeming capacity to work together for the people who put them in office.
This “lone, smug, wolf,” characterization has risen all the way to the Presidency (again, search Obama smug), which in my opinion in part explains the strong approval and ultimate strong disapproval of the President. He too seems to have the trait of being smug, an excessive pride in himself that shuts out the reality of others around him, including the information they have that could better inform, educate or simply help transform his untrue claims about Obamacare into truth.
But there’s more than smugness, which is about “oneself." There is also the partnering noun of contempt, which is about how these smug fellows seem to feel about others, which in both Senator Burr and President Obama’s cases seems to me to be the more problematic.
Contempt is a noun used to describe what we glean from someone’s behavior that the individual considers a person or a thing…beneath consideration, worthless,” (courtesy Google definitions). It is contempt, this attitude towards others that can leave one justifiably confident that neither of these two individuals are capable of changing their smug behavior within their roles as elected individuals within our government.
It’s the feeling that they really don’t care what anyone says, they are going to think what they want and do what they want because based on their preconceived notions established sometime before all facts were available, their beliefs have solidified into unchanging barriers to facts.
It’s the funhouse quality that has people sputtering in frustration. After all, how could the President still be confusing the terms healthcare and health insurance, or still be claiming that he intended to keep promises that if people liked their insurance they could keep it, or that Obamacare would save people money with a straight face? Not only isn’t it dignified or Presidential, it’s actually a little nuts in the face of the facts.
As for Senator Burr, with no facts supporting his claims, his only answer was a smirk when Dr. Martin pointed out facts.
More than annoying personality traits, the traits of smugness and that of contempt prevent those having them from engaging with the world around them, blocked by their own egos from getting a full picture, prevented by their sense of superiority from considering anything that contradicts their sets of beliefs. These are two terrible traits for lawmakers to have because their very personalities make them unable to be anything but incredible know-it-alls even when they don’t know it all.
