Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Shear jeenyus

“Is Obama Smart?”, Bret Stephens asks in the title of this WSJ article. We all know the answer, of course, but Mr. Stephens puts it all so well:
Of course, it's tempting to be immodest when your admirers are so immodest about you. How many times have we heard it said that Mr. Obama is the smartest president ever? Even when he's criticized, his failures are usually chalked up to his supposed brilliance. Liberals say he's too cerebral for the Beltway rough-and-tumble; conservatives often seem to think his blunders, foreign and domestic, are all part of a cunning scheme to turn the U.S. into a combination of Finland, Cuba and Saudi Arabia.

I don't buy it. I just think the president isn't very bright.
Also not to be missed is William McGurn’s comparison of Obama and Jimmy Carter. While many of us have seen general parallels, Mr. McGurn points out in some detail similarities that had not even occurred to me. For example:
Then there's realist theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. During the 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama proved his intellectual chops when, in response to a question about Niebuhr from a New York Times columnist, he replied, "I love him. He's one of my favorite philosophers." The column went on to describe Mr. Obama's campaign as "an attempt to thread the Niebuhrian needle."

Alas, even here Jimmy Carter got there first. The frontispiece of his campaign biography "Why Not the Best" features one of his favorite quotations from Niebuhr: "The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world." Scotty Reston duly noted Mr. Carter's admiration for Niebuhr in a Times column written when the future President Obama was just 14 years old.
As one of my own favorite philosophers, Dirty Harry, put it: “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Obama refuses to admit that he has any, even though many of the people who originally supported him are now waking up and taking notice. Most of Obama’s current critics in the legacy media will naturally resume their naps and continue propagandizing in their sleep for him once the Republican challenger is chosen; however, I think, for a lot of quondam Obamaphiles among the non-chattering classes, the bloom is permanently off the rose.

Update: The endless summer of Duh!

1 comment:

JorgXMcKie said...

I am from IL originally, and I spotted Obama for what he is long ago. He is an affirmative action baby who has been praised for the slightest sign of intelligence for too long. He is of average or slightly above intelligence, but he thinks really intelligent people are only faking it, since he gets away with not being too bright and still getting told how smart he is.

He doesn't and can't actually learn much except through gross repetition. Thus, as an adult who doesn't have to repeat things over and over again [and with all those folks telling him how smart and wonderful he is] he can't learn much.

Since he thinks everyone else is faking it, too. He doesn't feel the need to actually learn anything new. Therefore, in times of stress he doubles down on the stuff he thinks he knows.

It's sad, really. He might have made an acceptable greenskeeper or something else useful.