The Dumbest President...EVER!
By Stuart Schwartz
AmericanThinker.com
Barack Obama is the dumbest president...EVER.
That
is a reasonable conclusion once you've assessed the first nineteen
months of his presidency and compared it to the definition of
intelligence put together by researchers in the field. Although the
mainstream media have spent the last two years proclaiming Obama "super-smart"
or, as
Newsweek
put it, "sort of God" in stature and brilliance, the 44th
president of the United States is poised to surpass our 15th
president, James Buchanan. Jr., as the White
House
occupant who has made the dumbest moves while in office. With two
years left, he is on the fast track to last.
That
takes some doing, for the
leadership
of the hapless Buchanan prior to the Civil War "has led to his
consistent ranking by historians as one of the worst Presidents."
This is the president who vetoed a college funding bill because
"there were already too many educated people" in the young nation.
Buchanan's judgment was so wretched that he thought anti-slavery
forces could be convinced to give up their opposition by his
personal assurances that slaves were "treated with kindness and
humanity" and that poverty could be ended by simply printing more
money.
Sound familiar?
Barack Obama is dumb. How dumb? Alfred E. Newman dumb,
says
columnist David Limbaugh, who labeled him "President Alfred E.
Obama" because of his blithe disregard of the basics of fiscal
responsibility. Alfred E. Newman is the
Mad
magazine mascot, whose answer to every problem is his signature
statement: "What, me worry?"
How dumb? How-many-Obamas-does-it-take-to-screw-in-a-light-bulb
dumb. And in the answer lies the answer, the key to his pole
position in the race to last: It takes 242. One to hold the light
bulb, four to turn the ladder, eighteen to assess conformity to OSHA
workplace requirements, four to assess the environmental impact of
the burnt-out bulb disposal, twelve to participate in a task force
to evaluate green
energy solutions
for a replacement bulb, eight to script his actions, four to script
instructions and work the teleprompter, 23 to work with the justice
department to sue the light bulb manufacturer...you get the picture.
And, à la Buchanan, Obama never does get
that light bulb changed.
That
James Buchanan "fiddled while Rome burned"
seems
to be the consensus of historians. His approach to the raging
controversy over slavery in the decade preceding the Civil War was
based on ignoring evidence and acting upon events as he wished them
to be, not as they were. Fast-forward to the present: Obama responds
to the Gulf crisis by trying to move us toward the collapsed
centralized
green economy of Spain, ignoring the
fact
that even Spain acknowledges that "every 'green job' created with
government money...came at the cost of 2.2 regular jobs, and only
one in 10 of the newly created green jobs became a permanent job."
In
all areas of his presidency, Obama has demonstrated a striking
disregard of facts, lack of good reasoning, and inability to
function at an executive level, all at the core of the textbook
definition of intelligence derived from more than a half century of
research. Intelligence, the experts
tell
us, comes down to understanding the meaning of the world around us,
and then using that understanding to live skillfully and
appropriately (i.e., to get stuff done). One
survey
of more than fifty researchers in the field of intelligence offers
the following definition:
A very special mental capability that,
among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve
problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn
quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book
learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts.
Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for
comprehending our surroundings---"catching on", "making sense"
of things, or "figuring out" what to do.
Obama is Buchanan-esque
in his inability to function as an executive, a key part of
intelligence. Even a cursory analysis of history shows that limited
government and free markets have produced prosperity; so Obama
expands government and takes over private businesses, causing one
observer to throw up his hands at another Buchanan moment from Obama
and
exclaim,
"It isn't rocket science, Mr. President!" Hands-on executives and
laser focus are business school basics for solving problems; so
Obama
parties
rather than roll up his sleeves,
unleashes
federal regulators on hapless Gulf state residents rather than
cutting through the red tape, and appoints study panels even as the
oil washes ashore (e.g., see
video timeline).
Radical Islamists are waging war against the United States; Obama
does a full Buchanan -- or, if you will, an Alfred E. Newman-style
"What, me worry?" -- and,
denying
the existence of Islamic terrorism,
asks
whom are you going to believe -- me or your lying eyes?
The
ability
to draw reasonable conclusions from everyday life and then use those
conclusions to adapt is fundamental to high intelligence, says
cognitive psychologist Robert J. Steinberg, the
award-winning
Tufts University dean and University of Cambridge fellow. In other
words, the scientific community has established good reasoning,
learning from past experience, and acting according to those
experiences as integral to high intelligence.
It
does not include, as David Brooks,
tells
us, having an exceptional and "perfectly creased pant [leg]" or --
in what Hot Air's Allahpundit calls "a loathsome expression of
elitism" -- being able to "talk like us," Brooks, and others of the
"smart set." If that were the case, all we would need to increase
intelligence in the U.S. Congress is to provide our elected
representatives with dry cleaning services. As for the "talk like
us" part, it doesn't take intelligence to talk like a self-styled
intellectual, a.k.a. a New York Times columnist. Hawkeye Pearce has
already shown us the way in the classic "Love
Story"
episode of television's "Mash."
He teaches Radar, the shy Iowa farm boy who has a crush on a nurse
who reads the classics and enjoys Bach, to reply with, eyebrows
uplifted, "Ahhh...Bach" when she discusses music and throw in the
occasional "That's highly significant."
Want
to impress David Brooks and others of the media engaging in what
Bernard Goldberg
calls
"a slobbering love affair" with the president? Simple. Reply, as
Obama has done, "Ahhh...Burke" to David Brooks, enthralled by a
president who expressed appreciation for the "finer points" of
political philosophy; or flash your degree to Christopher Buckley,
formerly of National Review, awestruck by Obama's "Harvard
intellect"; or simply present Marxism and mainline elegance as
typical of the academic life, and media academics like Michael
Beschloss will
gush
on mainstream news, "he's probably the smartest guy ever to become
President."
But
intelligence is as intelligence does, as Forest Gump might remind
us. Harvard has produced more than its share of great men and women,
but it has also produced the
Unabomber,
Barney Frank, and Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling...and now, the next
James Buchanan.
So the next time Brooks or others in the mainstream media firmament
tell you that Barack Obama is a towering intellect, the smartest
president ever, just nod your head wisely and say, "Ahhh...pant
leg."
Stuart Schwartz, a
former retail and media executive, is on the faculty at Liberty
University in Lynchburg, Virginia.