What disturbs me most of all, besides the content of the proposed legislation itself, is the fact that the people that come up with this stuff don't appdear to have any clue whatsoever that these bandaid "solutions" will not garner any positive result.

Shutting downb a website is pointless. At any given hosting provider, a single IP address might host 200+ websites. Clearly SOPA (I hope) can't stop access to the IP address so that leaves the hostname. But the hostname needs to be exact. www.mybigserverisawesome1.com is not the same as www.mybigserverisawesome2.com, so, all a "pirate" need do is get a couple hundred of these slightly different domain names and as soon as one gets shut down, they can just copy content to the other. Or in truth, all domains can just point to the same content really, it's just a few tweaks on the web server.

I'm over-simplifying but my point is that they just seem to be too dull to think things through. On the other hand, often these things are just manueviering. Even though SOPA, perhaps they knew that would be the case but are just positioning pieces on a chess board. Now that the legislators involved know the extent of the resistance to this more extreme version of what will eventually come out, they know how to deal with that resistance effectively. SOPA II & beyond will likely be a lot harder to fight off.

So are the politicians super-smart and super-dull, I don't really know.