While perusing the online editorial page of the Washington Times, I saw this op-ed.
Of morons and put-ons
By Alan CarubaObama convinces voters they made a mistake in 2008
How many recall the eight years of George W. Bush’s two terms in office, during which he was derided constantly as being too dumb to be president? He was deemed “a frat boy,” and yet Mr. Bush had graduated from Yale University and had gone on to secure a master’s degree from Harvard Business School. When his grades were compared to those of Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry during Mr. Bush’s campaign for re-election, it turned out the president had higher scores.
We can’t compare Barack Obama’s grades to Mr. Bush’s or anyone else’s because they and other indicators of his scholastic achievements have been hidden from public review.
This is not, however, a defense of Mr. Bush. This is about a question millions of Americans are beginning to ask: Is President Obama just a moron?
When I use the term, it should be noted that we have had presidents in the past who had impressive scholastic records but still turned out to be dumber than your average pea-picker and ridge-runner.
Woodrow Wilson took office after a distinguished career in academia and had been the governor of New Jersey. It was Wilson who embraced the income tax and turned out to be astonishingly naive about international affairs despite having helped the allies win World War I. Jimmy Carter, on paper, was no dummy. A graduate of the Naval Academy, he had been governor of Georgia, but as president, he was a dismal failure.
In early 2009, I wrote a commentary, “Putting a child in charge,” suggesting that having a young president – Mr. Obama was 47 at the time – in charge of the greatest economic and military power in the world might not be a good idea. I noted that Mr. Obama’s resume was unusually thin in terms of any real achievement. His main claim was that he had been a community organizer in Chicago. Politically, he was known best as a state senator for having voted “present” much of the time, and he had barely spent any time in the U.S. Senate before beginning to run for president.
It’s not as if he didn’t signal what he actually thought. “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.” Huh? When did we ever care what other nations thought about our driving or eating or the setting on our thermostats?
Michelle was scary, too. “Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual – uninvolved, uninformed.”
Not that far into his first 20 months in office, the independent Tea Party movement erupted all over the nation, and it wasn’t because hundreds of thousands of Americans were uninvolved or uninformed. The problem was that a million of them had journeyed earlier to Washington to protest against passage of the disastrous Obamacare “reforms” only to be dismissed by the White House as “wrong.”
Americans took notice of all the tax cheats and various loonies nominated to be in Mr. Obama’s Cabinet, many of whom had to withdraw from consideration, one who became secretary of the Treasury and dozens who went on to become “czars” without any vetting from Congress.
