0bama’s intellectual shallowness

Instapundit:

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: Obama: “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, for, you know, historic reasons.”

Apparently, when Obama taught Constitutional Law he never got around to teaching the Texas White (Democratic) Primary cases. Or talking about which side was which in the Civil War . . . .

Updated to make clear to people who don’t click the link that it was the Texas Democrats who excluded black voters (and Mexican-Americans) from their primaries (and then dodged further with the Jaybird Democratic Association when the courts struck down the White Primaries). This is a major set of cases under state action, and I’m surprised that Obama is unfamiliar with this history. I wonder what he covered in his Constitutional Law classes?

Remember, guys, this clown was sold to us as an “intellectual” unlike the “stupid” Bush. His followers even claimed he was a constitutional law professor at U. of Chicago, when in fact he was a mere adjunct lecturer and never had regular faculty status. (This is not surprising in light of an essentially nonexistent scholarly publication list.) The blogprof has more on 0bama’s academic (non)career, and Doug Ross claims to have gotten off-the-record comments from a senior law prof at U. of Chicago that put 0bama’s time there in an unflattering light to say the least.

But I leave the last word to Powerline:

Barack Obama is a creature of the modern university and therefore an amazingly shallow man. I have written about his historical howlers in the New York Post column “Anti-terror oops,” in the Weekly Standard column “The Kennedy-Khrushchev conference for dummies,” and in the Power Line post “Obama veers into the Daily Ditch.”

Obama’s historical ignorance could be a full time beat for somebody who does this work for a living, and it tells us something truly important about Barack Obama. His ignorance is as broad as it is deep. Not that you couldn’t deduce that on your own from his performance on the job.

Yesterday he was at it again, in his peevish interview with the feisty local broadcast reporter from Texas. Why are you so unpopular in Texas? the reporter asked. Obama being Obama, he was unable to laugh off the question and say he’d do better next time around. Obama responded: “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, for, you know, historic reasons.”

Has the guy ever heard of LBJ? You know, the fellow who first brought us socialized medicine? Has he ever read a single volume of Robert Caro’s monumental biography of LBJ? It’s hard to miss the extent to which the Democratic Party dominated Texas politics for the duration of LBJ’s (long) political career.

Obama majored in political science at Columbia. Did he miss the fact that Texas was part of the solidly Democratic South — the slaveholding, segregated, Jim Crow South — more or less from statehood in 1845 until Nixon’s 1972 landslide?

Did Obama skip class the day he might have learned that in the the postbellum South, including Texas, the Republican Party was virtually nonexistent? Apparently so. Or maybe he was just deploying his skills as a bs artist to deflect a question that could not be reconciled with his self-worship.

JOHN adds: I’ve concluded that Obama isn’t a smart person. He just plays one on television.

Ouch.

Contrast and compare: Tax Day Tea Party in San Francisco (!) vs. “US Uncut”

Zombie has a great photo-reportage up comparing and contrasting two demos in San Francisco (of all places): A sizable, enthusiastic Tea Party rally (in just about the least likely/friendly place for it) and an event by US Uncut that drew a whopping… 45 people and was clearly astroturfed.(Still a succcess compared with the joint event with the “Coffee Party” elsewhere, which drew 20 people.)

Get thee over there. I cannot do the essay justice by selective quoting.

The Tea Party rally was attended by one offensive troll which was clearly identified by “Infiltrator” signs. Guess who was interviewed by the OTMSM media scribbler in attendance?

Today in history: April 19, 1943: start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Passover is the day when Jews celebrate their release from Pharaoh’s bondage in Egypt. There have been many more Pharaohs in later history, and the most infamous of them had a habit of carrying out “Aktione” on Jewish holidays in order to capture the maximum number of Jews at synagogue or the home (out of hiding).

Today is the 1st day of Passover (15 Nisan on the Jewish calendar). Exactly 67 years ago on the secular calendar (19 April 1943), and exactly as many years plus one day ago on the Hebrew calendar (14 Nisan 5703), the Nazis (y”sh) has planned a major “Aktion” to empty out what was left of the Warsaw Ghetto. To their surprise, they were suddenly faced with an armed revolt: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had begun. Below are two videoclips about it:

As we face new Pharaohs — aided and abetted by self-described “progressives” who seem to find common cause with the most reactionary forces imaginable — let me share with you a song by David Draiman (the Jewish frontman of heavy metal band Disturbed) about precisely this.

Have a wonderful Passover. And NEVER AGAIN indeed.

Atlas is shrugging already

(via Instapundit). I am no Randian, and Ayn Rand’s style isn’t my cup of tea. But Atlas Shrugged‘s message against collectivism and, often overlooked, against crony capitalism has perhaps never been more relevant.

Dutch mall shooting claims 7 dead, 16 wounded

At a Dutch shopping mall at the Amsterdam suburb of Alphen on the Rhine (Alphen aan de Rijn), a shooter killed 7 and wounded 16 before turning the gun on himself. (See, e.g., CNN via multiple sources on Twitter.)

And that’s despite gun control laws that are outright draconian by US standards.

According to the liveblog at Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad (in Dutch), the shooter was a native Dutchman age 24. He was a member of a shooting club, held permits for five guns, and owned three. It is not clear if the weapon he used (which sounds like a submachine gun from the vague descriptions) was one of the licensed ones. Despite earlier claims, he does not appear to have been ex-military.

His mother found a suicide note. He had previously been the subject of a police inquiry (no details given) but the case was dismissed. More here (likewise in Dutch). Another note supposedly claimed that bombs had been left at three malls: these had been evacuated but no bombs were found.

Innumeracy and wordsmith “intellectuals”

Insty today hit a raw nerve:

TAXING THE RICH: The math just doesn’t work. But as we’ve seen, Obama and the dems seem deep in the grip of innumeracy — or, alternatively, they hope the voters are.

It goes further than just the 0bama administration. In the circles of “wordsmith” intellectuals, who live or die by their pen, articulateness is all too often confused with intelligence. When one engages some of these people (say, J’ism school grads) in discussion on nonverbal subjects — including totally apolitical ones — one often encounters astonishingly limited minds in the numerical (and, to a lesser extent visuospatial) realm. The word “innumeracy” is only a mild poetic exaggeration in many cases, and dead-on accurate in some others. A school and college system that increasingly allows pupils/students to avoid grappling with math and science only makes things worse.

 

On fiscal crisis denialism

It is quite amazing, really. People like myself are being called “global warming deniers” and told we are the moral equivalent of Shoah deniers for having some skepticism over the catastrophic AGW scenario and being opposed to making sweeping changes in the economy and society to avert a far-off, uncertain threat predicted by opaque computer models.

Yet these same people have their heads completely buried in the sand about a clear, present, and imminent  fiscal crisis which can be understood by anybody who has ever had to balance a budget. And anybody trying to make even baby steps to do something about that problem is immediately accused of wanting to starve seniors, making the poor eat dog and cat food,… and other blatant ploys of emotional blackmail.

Of course, in the latter case, the New Class/government class would lose out on both jobs and patronage if solutions were implemented, while in the former case, implementation of the “solution” would entail a vast increase of government/regulatory jobs for themselves, patronage for their mascots/electoral cannon fodder, and power & control over all of us. Coincidence? I didn’t think so either.

 

Richard Goldstone retracts Israel genocide accusation after damage done

Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic reports that Richard Goldstone has retracted his accusations against Israel (emphases mine):

This is as shocking as it is unexpected: the South African Jewish judge Richard Goldstone, who excoriated Israel for allegedly committing premeditated crimes against civilians in Gaza — contributing, more than any other individual, to the delegitimization and demonization of the Jewish state —  now says, well, Israel didn’t actually set out to target Palestinian civilians, unllike Hamas, whose plainly-apparent goal was to murder Israeli civilians.

It is not clear, reading Goldstone’s mea culpa in The Washington Post, that he fully understands the consequences of his work:

Our report found evidence of potential war crimes and “possibly crimes against humanity” by both Israel and Hamas. That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying — its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.

The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted [by Israel] as a matter of policy.

Well, I’m glad he’s cleared that up. Unfortunately, it is somewhat difficult to retract a blood libel, once it has been broadcast across the world.

This is, indeed, roughly the judicial equivalent of the New York Times making an outrageous accusation on the front page above the fold, then running a correction/retraction on page A20 months later. The damage is done and can never be wholly undone.

His retraction now may be rank opportunism or the beginning of teshuvah (repentance). Repentance (as Jews understand the concept) has three steps (actually four): (1) recognizing the transgression or iniquity; (2a) expressing remorse and (2b) trying to undo the damage insofar as possible; (3) taking steps to ensure it can never happen again. If Goldstone’s step is genuine, it is only a baby step and it now falls upon him to go out and speak everywhere with a loud, clear voice.