Article: An Aggregation of Nincompoops — Viewed from across the pond, the U.S. government seems at best incompetent and at worst a joke.

From Foreign Policy. Click here to read the entire article.

In 1939, Joseph Kennedy, then serving as U.S. ambassador to Britain, petitioned President Franklin D. Roosevelt to restrict foreign screenings of Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington on the grounds that the film was “an indictment of our government” that “will cause our allies to view us in an unfavorable light.” Capra’s depiction of a Washington dominated by special interests and toadying political hacks also angered Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley, a Democrat from Kentucky, who complained that the movie presented a “grotesque distortion” of Washington politics that suggested that the Senate was nothing more than an “aggregation of nincompoops.”