Isn't the simplest explanation that he's just not that smart?

Another repurposed email 😉

. . . So it turns out that Obama relied on an angry left blogger for his assertion that Churchill eschewed torture, a claim which anyone with a passing knowledge of history would have recognized as false, and which the White House has now confirmed came from Andrew Sullivan:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/05/023484.php

More interesting in the post is that it asserts — correctly I believe — that Obama displays an astonishing lack of understanding of history.  It makes reference to his earlier use of the Kennedy-Kruschev meeting as an example of why we should talk to our enemies when, in fact, anyone familiar with the meetings, even Kennedy accolytes, would agree that the meeting was a disastrous embarrassment for the United States and showed Kennedy as weak and inexperienced.  It invited the Cuban Missile Crisis which brought the world to the brink of destruction.

This is actually the same point that a really smart guy I know made as recently as 10 months ago:

Undecided as in Obama versus McCain.  Obama‘s comments on a single,
contiguous Palestinian State demonstrates a real lack of understanding
of the complexity for Middle Eastern politics.

I don’t care about misstatements — Bush made them all the time and if anything it only made him seem like more of a real person.  It also gave him the chance to demonstrate a humility and self-effacing style that I think we’d both agree is not exactly one of Obama’s most notable characteristics.  But the things I’m talking about, and the things which worry me, are not misstatements.  They’re increasingly obvious examples of the fact that Obama simply knows very little about history or the world around him.  You or I wouldn’t have quoted Sullivan’s anecdote on Churchill — not because we don’t trust Sullivan (though I don’t of course) but because we both know enough about history to know that there’s no reason to remotely suspect that a tough-as-nails bad-ass like Winston Churchill would ever have said something as stupid and painty-waisted as “We don’t torture” or that “The reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts and, over time, that corrodes what’s best in people. It corrodes the best of the country.”  We’d have questioned the story cause it doesn’t fit into any intelligent historical context that we’ve ever read.

The left talks about how Obama is the most intellectual President we’ve ever had, but it’s noteworthy that he’s released nothing of his academic record, he wrote no articles for the Law Review, he wouldn’t release grades, scores, theses, etc.  The only thing we know is that he graduated without honors from Columbia.  He produced no meaningful legislation either in the Illinois State Senate or in the US Senate, so the basis for people’s assertion that he is intellectual is that he delivers beautiful speeches.

As someone who delivers speeches for a living I know that if there’s an indication of a speaker’s intelligence it’s not his ability to read beautiful words that someone else writes.  Plenty of people with high double-digit IQs could read my written speech off a state of the art teleprompter and sound as intelligent as I do when I deliver it.  The difference is that I know my material.  I learn it frontwards and backwards, and if the power goes out in the middle of a presentation (as it did once thanks to California’s rolling blackouts 😉 I can continue to teach without the computer or the slides, describing the data and the graphics which my audience would otherwise be viewing.  Contrast this with Obama’s repeated inability to operate for even moments without the crutch of his teleprompter, and it becomes much less clear to me why his skill in reading is mistaken by some for intelligence.

Think about the times when he’s spoken without a teleprompter — the “lipstick on a pig” gaffe (which is when they started putting him on an all-teleprompter diet by the way), the “Special Olympics” gaffe on the Tonight Show, the Churchill misquote, and my personal favorite this one where he got ahead of his teleprompter, this one where he suggests giving Breathalyzer’s to kids with asthma and then goes off on a nearly Biden-esque ramble.  And then there’s the video from Europe where he thinks that they speak Austrian in Austria.

I understand the evidence that proves his naiivete to me is not compelling to my Obamacon friends, but they’re not seeing any of this in the mainstream press.  They’re seeing it (presumably) only from me.  If (and I don’t think this is the case, but if) it turned out that there were 2 events like this every day, or 10, or 100, would they at some point start to think they’d been lied to about O being the smartest and dreamiest guy ever to occupy the Oval?

And continuing my long tirade over the fawning media coverage which prevents any real scrutiny of the damage Obama is doing, it’s worth noting that even the liberal Pew Center has now documented, based on quantitative measures and actual data, that Obama received twice as much positive coverage in his first 100 days than Bush, and 50% more than Clinton.

http://hotair.com/archives/2009/05/04/pew-media-treatment-of-obama-much-more-positive-than-bush-clinton/

In the end, people will hopefully be swayed more by results than they will by the increasingly obvious cheerleading by the press.  We haven’t talked much about the trillion dollar deficits or the coming inflation and taxation, but that’s a worthwhile discussion as well, and one that’ll be much harder for the media to hide.  At the rate Obama is borrowing, there is, historically, a near-zero chance of avoiding high levels of inflation similar to or greater than what we saw under Carter.  Telling people how dreamy the President is while they’re facing constantly rising prices and higher tax bills gets to be a big task even for Chris Matthews.

But seriously, these quantitative studies of media fawning, hopefully make it easier to understand why I absolutely positively celebrate every time another major newspaper goes under.  I think it’s an event worth celebrating as a free market for information — something we absolutely lack in the country right now — is critical to the success of the democracy.

I'm calling it for McCain

I’ve got to get up in a few hours to go volunteer on election day, but I want to go on record here with something that I’ve been saying for weeks but just haven’t had time to write up.

The polls this year have been, whether through incompetence or malfeasance, utterly useless. I think this is related to a few things:

1. Tendency for Obama supporters to *really* like to talk about their having been saved by The One. Think about it, how many Obama supporters have you been approached by with breathless stories of their pending salvation. On the other hand, how many McCain supporters did you only find out were McCain supporters when it came up some other way. The numbers of people who are declining to talk to pollsters this year is huge.
2. Social conformity. There’s a great article linked from Zombietime which describes not only how this works, but why it doesn’t matter. In any case, it’s driven by the unprecedented ferocity of the Obamacons attacks on any dissenting voice. Fortunately, for the time being, the Democrats in Congress only want to rob workers of their secret ballots. They’ll come after voters after that, but at the moment American voters will be alone in their polling booths.
3. Extension of media bias.  Most of these polls are sponsored by the same news organizations that have spent the last two years trying to convince us that Obama had already won. Polls are not clear mathematics. They, like the temperature prediction models that create global warming alarmism, are based on highly subjective equasions and weightings which try to predict turnout.  This year, they are overwhelmingly weighted toward a Democratic turnout model which looks nothing like the past. In a nutshell, they’re based on the assumption that all those first-time voters who turned up to put President Gore and President Kerry into office will turn up this year in massive numbers. What do you think?

Here’s the real reason The One has been encouraging all three of these things. To get you to stay home.  If you believe your candidate is going to lose in a landslide, then why bother showing up to cast your lone ballot.  But first of all, we know better.  And second of all, first time voters don’t.  The same forces that are supposed to keep conservatives at home out of despair will more likely keep liberals at home chilling their champagne.

And here’s the proof.  Both campaigns have excellent internal polling mechanisms that should be as reliable and accurate as anything out there. There’s no reason for a campaign to feed itself biased data even if it encourages the media to feed biased data to the public.  The campaigns use this internal polling to determine where they have the best shot at winning.

And when you look where BO, McCain and Palin have been hanging out these last few days, a lot of it is in places that those media polls say Obama’s already got sealed up tight.  So why would Obama be spending his precious last few campaign days in Pennsylvania, a traditionally blue state, if the polls preducting a landslide for him are accurate.

Answer: he wouldn’t, and the polls are anything but accurate.

All you have to do is vote today. So. Go. Vote!! And tell your conservative friends to do the same!!  Oh, and make sure your Obama friends know that if the poll lines are too long they can cast their ballots by text message through the American Idol numbers.  😉

Update: OK, you may have already heard this, but apparently my predictions above were not precisely correct. 😉 That said, see the post above for why this election feels a whole lot closer than it should have been given Obama’s structural advantages.