Obama: don’t know much about history, but I know what I like
I have long lamented the decline of the teaching of history and of critical thinking. One can be a highly intelligent intellectual today and know almost nothing about either.
This is where it’s led us. A Democratic nominee this ignorant, and a populace who can’t tell the difference.
Obama is the least qualified serious contender for the Presidency from either party that I can recall in my lifetime. And that includes Ross Perot.
Something like half my friends believe that citizen diplomacy, non-violence, and New Age thinking brought down the Soviet Union.
I think you have to go back William Jennings Bryan to find a serious candidate as poorly qualified as Obama.
Maybe Americans can’t figure Obama out from history but when he starts babbling. “”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,” Americans are going to notice.
odd thing about despotics, they dont usually have a lot of experience… if they did they probably couldnt rise so fast, and therefore wouldnt have to be despots to remain or have a place after.
the parallels are scary… though what bothers me more is not so much that he is inexperienced or any other equivalent.
its who is parents are, his friends, his mentors, etc. heck, even the artwork and such.
we have ayers… we have wright.. his father was a red, his stepfather was a red… his uncle helped overthrow a african country to a communist one through subversion. all the leftist nutjobs support him… the terrorist orgs have endorsed him…
the crowds are not that amazing when you understand that this is a mass movement that he is playing, and that every radical group is mandating that their people show up to create this kind of mass movement feel.
when has any on the right ever had such mob mentality?
the minute that i saw that kind of group i saw all my fears confirmed.
Truth is never pleasant enough to rouse the masses to the cause. — Artfldgr 2008
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
Abraham Lincoln, (attributed)
16th president of US (1809 – 1865)
lincoln was talking to and about a free country. but if the country stops being free the minute you fool “all of the people” ONCE.
the quote would not work if there was no assumption of perpetual american freedom.
When in the past 75 years has the right had mass rallies? (actually when has small government, more freedom, personal responsibility, ever had a mass movement other than the American revolution? which wasnt a mass movement)
Kind of hard to be a fascist/communist group if you’re not having the mass rallies that are a signature of such left movements. No?
No one telling any form of the truth or working from merit can be so loved (without war), that the masses will step forward. The side that tells the truth or says that something will not work because of some set of principals of merit, is the side that can never have a mass movement.
they cant make so many people happy. all those people in the crowd have to do is start comparing what they think they are getting promised to see how nothing will be delivered.
here is an image that someone else put together
http://blogwonks.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/obamahitler-thumb.jpg
you can find all these images where obama is made to look like malcom x and king… you can find images made by Shepard Fairey with obamas blessing that are socialist (soviet) realism… you can even find images of obama with maos rays from the sun from behind him…
you can find tons of soviet realism kinds of imagry where he is the mover in a large crowd… (compare to past elections)… you can find lots where he is looking up and to the left or right… like they are getting their messages or orders from god… or have long vision past you… also there are images which are angelic with his head down… even with praying hands as well.
this is the language of symbols… not the language of merit… the language that appeals to our inner archtypes… our safety creates a naivette that prevents us from defending ourselves..
look up what neros cross is and then a peace sign… even the history of the peace sign has its revision history…
symbols have meanings…
and mass movements are fed on symbols… because the feeling becomes that one is in line with the one that will make things happen the way you want it. this feeling is manufactured with the abuse of the phrases that indicate imporance, but in themselves convey little meaning. so we fill it in…
change? what change? most fill it with the change they want… everyone in the row can have a different idea of change, and no two compare notes to know that they are all mutually exclusive.
thats how you get so many at a rally… (along with paying some, as well as getting every organization to tell there members to be there).
you sell them on the feeling, not the facts.
Spring stalk severs
its fragile roots;
Media replant with love.
Hostility to history knowledge is a core progressive trait… for a blend of reasons.
1) They’ve always thought that little can be learned from it. Their vision has all the answers. Looking for answers in the past leads to conservative notions.
1b) When they do venture into history, as they perceive themselves as outsiders (vs. a conservative mainstream) they tend to think the ‘conventional’ lessons of history are all wrong. Hence, looking forward to the ‘new age’… if only we broke out of our old ways and did it their way… et cetera…
2) Laziness / base stealing… sorry, I think it is part of progressivism. Part of the appeal of joining them is once one dons leftism one can claim to be ‘all good things’ including intellectual (vs. evil and dumb conservatives)… without doing any of heavy lifting to earn those…. Like being a good person… or reading serious books…
How soon we forget that neocons were once vehemently on the other side of this question.
When the Reagan administration was semi-secretly (how does a democratic society have semi-secrets?) funneling U.S. taxpayer dollars to bin Laden and his ilk in Afghanistan, the neocons bridled at the suggestion that the threat of radical Islamists could be on par with that posed by the “Evil Empire.”
To this day, many neocons stubbornly laud Reagan’s decision to support the Islamic terrorists on the same grounds–that the Soviet Union posed a much greater threat than the religious freaks who would murder thousands of Americans on 9/11.
How soon we forget that the Reagan administration, with some help from conservative Democrats, overcame liberals in congress who sought to block aid to Pakistan because intelligence showed the country was developing a nuclear weapon. The aid to Pakistan was the administration’s “semi-secret,” i.e. mainstream media-friendly legal dodge, way of spending my tax dollars on terrorism by bin Laden and his radical comrades in the nascent Islamic extremist movement.
Pakistan’s bomb-making technology reportedly, unsurprisingly, found its way to Iran and Algeria and possibly Saudi Arabia (happy co-sponsors of the Taliban)–all because American neocons insisted on a moral, political and financial blank check to fight the Soviet Union.
It’s no surprise, then that neocons are yet again demanding a blank check to fight the radical Islamist threat they directly assisted in developing. I am surprised, though, at how boldly they flaunt their denial of this not even semi-secret history.
I’ve been critical of Obama from just about day 1. Now, I’m just plain scared.
You took the words out of my mind. Obama has got to be the most ignorant, narrow, incurious, and thoughtless candidate who has ever made a serious run at the presidency. And that includes William Jennings Bryan, who said many intelligent things if you read what he actually said as opposed to getting your history from that wretched bit of propaganda, Inherit the Wind.
People often underrate new threats because they don’t look like the old threats. In the early 1930s, military aircraft didn’t look very impressive compared with battleships. It took unusually perceptive individuals to grasp that a warship could really be sunk by an airplane that weighed one-ten-thousandth as much.
But failing to grasp the threat of asymmetrical warfare and of rogue states **after 9/11* is like mocking the torpedo bomber after Pearl Harbor.
It took unusually perceptive individuals to grasp that a warship could really be sunk by an airplane that weighed one-ten-thousandth as much.
It was more like the fact that aircraft carriers could take you out at a distance where a battleship might not even see them. The aircraft functined as both scouts, early warning sentries, as well as bombers and anti-bomber escorts.
Any single individual airplane is pretty weak, all said. But when used together, with good pilots and half decent strategies, they could sink battleships for a fraction of the cost in casualties.
A sort of asymmetric warfare in which if you can’t fight their tanks, fight their tank commanders by court martialing them with enemy propaganda.
Amanda: FDR supplied Stalin. Sometimes there are no good choices.
Amanda Rectumwidth:
When the Reagan administration was semi-secretly (how does a democratic society have semi-secrets?) funneling U.S. taxpayer dollars to bin Laden and his ilk in Afghanistan
No we didn’t:
http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/24-318760.html
“The United States did not “create” Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda. The United States supported the Afghans fighting for their country’s freedom — as did other countries, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China, Egypt, and the UK — but the United States did not support the “Afghan Arabs,” the Arabs and other Muslims who came to fight in Afghanistan for broader goals. CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen notes that the “Afghan Arabs functioned independently and had their own sources of funding.”
We didn’t fund Binny and his Afghan Arabs. That is a lie. They were funded by Islamic charities in the US and Europe.
Apropos to not much of the above except Obama, I feel I have to share something I heard last night. Just before the 11:00 PM news on NBC (no big surprise), the anchor had a “teaser” which showed a quick clip of Pres. Bush speaking into a microphone, while the newscaster said — and I quote word for word (because I almost fell out of bed when I heard it!) “Pres. Bush downplays his comparison of Obama to Hitler.”
If we are living in a time and place when “THE NEWS” can make up pure fiction and telecast it – seriously — then we have SERIOUS trouble. Too many people who are not highly educated, do not necessarily seek out information for themselves, do not have inquiring minds believe such propaganda because they believe it “must be true” because “they said it on The News!”
Sorry to be off subject, but this made me crazy!
Amanda Reckonwith
at the suggestion that the threat of radical Islamists could be on par with that posed by the “Evil Empire.”
please document who was saying this back in the 1980s.
Obonga says Iran is not much of a threat to the security of the United States and Israel or the rest of the free world.
The Lamestream Media does not cover this major faux pas of his – AND THEY NEVER WILL. The truth about him will never reach the widest audiences, which is why he is going to win and we are in big, big trouble.
Those on the left firmly believe that the only history they have to read of this country is Howard Zinn’s revisionist version of it. Unfortunately, those who teach history these days have mostly taken up that charge and have largely colonized the subject for Marxism.
Well, he was CLOSE. I mean, Arabic is spoken in Iraq and in southwestern Iran, and in madrassas in Pakistan, and Afghanistan is CLOSE to those countries. Fifty-seven varieties- excuse me STATES- is close to fifty. Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, they’re all CLOSE to each other- closer to each other than California and Kenya are to each other. I mean Truman DID negotiate with Japan, and allow Japan to keep the emperor. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were simply precursors of global warming- nothing to do with the war or with negotiations.
If this is what an elite school education gets you, I am glad I am public school all the way. I picked up more history from high school and from independent reading than Obama appears to have gotten from all those elite school history departments.
Yes, the aid wasn’t handed directly to bin Laden. This is why I wrote: “and his ilk.”
I’m sure you’ll agree that bin Laden’s viability as a terrorist depended on the aid his mujahideen cohorts received and that the triumph of U.S.-backed Islamic radicals helped propel the movement.
So Gray’s quibble has no bearing on my point that neocons demanded a blank check to fight the Soviets and insisted that the “Evil Empire” was a greater threat than Afghanistan’s Islamic radicals. As a result, we overdrew bigtime in Afghanistan, all the while patting ourselves on the back furiously for killing Soviets, in deep denial of the unintended, though foreseeable, consequences of supporting Islamic radicals.
And…
Gringo asks for “documentation” that neocons argued the Soviet threat was greater than that from Islamic radicals.
Simple logic should suffice. If neocons did not believe the Soviets were a greater threat, why did they support arming the Islamic radicals? Why did they lobby against and ultimately defeat efforts to sanction Pakistan for trying to develop a nuclear bomb?
If Gringo is still unconvinced, he has merely to refer to the posters on this on this very blog who directly make the argument that the Soviets were the greater threat.
Gringo asks for “documentation” that neocons argued the Soviet threat was greater than that from Islamic radicals.
If you make a claim, you should be able to document it. Who was talking about the threat from Islamic radicals back then ? WHO ?
Amanda Reckonwith Says:
“…When the Reagan administration was semi-secretly (how does a democratic society have semi-secrets?) funneling U.S. taxpayer dollars to bin Laden..”
The US never gave a dime to Bin Laden, or his org, you moron…
expat Says:
“Amanda: FDR supplied Stalin. Sometimes there are no good choices.”
True and with good reason. We could not have won WWII without a viable USSR attacking from the east. We’d have lost… period.
Amanda Reckonwith Says:
“I’m sure you’ll agree that bin Laden’s viability as a terrorist depended on the aid his mujahideen cohorts received and that the triumph of U.S.-backed Islamic radicals helped propel the movement.”
Nope… I don’t.
The US aided Afghans. Not Bin Laden. Nice spin to try to confuse the two under ‘Islamic radicals’ though.
Intellectual? Possibly. Highly intelligent? No.
White shell black stone
Barack plays go
winner loser
There were many factions in Afgan resistance warring with each other and divided by ethnic lines: Uzbek and Tajik Northern Aliance, Pushtuns under Gulbetdin Hekmatiar, and, later, some Arabs from Al Qaeda. US were supporting Pushtuns, and the idea that this could help other factions is ridiculous.
As “Amanda” and Obama so diligently show us, the only history liberals are interested in is the history they themselves invent to support their arguments.
Reality, for the “reality-based community” is endlessly mutable. Words mean what they decide they mean. The past changes to suit them. The laws of nature can be repealed.
This is not new, either:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
Obama and Michelle are the logical extrapolation products of Affirmative Action. Hostile, self-centered, self-pitying, manipulative, amoral. I am afraid, very afraid of the tremendous and irreversible harm he can and will wreak on us all should he become POTUS, with a craven Congressional supermajority as his enabler. Our homegrown Chavez-equivalent.
Makes me feel like a beef looking into the abbatoir in front of me; maybe interesting to observe, but only from a far-removed distance.
Yes, the aid wasn’t handed directly to bin Laden. This is why I wrote: “and his ilk.”
I’m sure you’ll agree that bin Laden’s viability as a terrorist depended on the aid his mujahideen cohorts received and that the triumph of U.S.-backed Islamic radicals helped propel the movement.
I agree to nothing of the sort. His viability as a terrorist was damaged by the successes of the indigenous mujahideen we were arming and training.
The Mujahideen in Afghanistan turned their backs on the starving radicals in favor of US support.
No longer needed, Binny and ‘his ilk’ tried to return to Saudi Arabia, but because of their training and radicalism were seen as a threat to the Saudi Monarchy–and they were.
Most of the Afghan Arabs who left Afghanistan ended up in The Sudan–who tried to turn them over to the US ‘cuz they were destabilizing the place with money and Wahhabism. But Clinton said ‘No, we don’t want them’.
You know the rest of the story.
Go read a book, or do some research, ‘Amanda’….
Amanda reminds me of former poster “Laura” who was known for not documenting what she said, and for considering null any source that did not agree with her point of view, regardless of the source’s veracity.
History revisionism drives me nuts. the other day i had an argument with a young french man as to the military actions in iraq, and how its an imperial occupation.
by the time we got that far, i just said to him that i notice you speak french… he said oui! i asked him then does he know any german? he said non…
i said thats beacuse we occupied france for a while.
otherwise, he would be speaking either german or russian given the outcomes…
at that point he got disgusted about americans and their blindness to facts about imperialism…
[heck i almost got him to see the difference between the american revolution and the french… the major difference is that the losers had a choice as to what they did… as far as i remember, the french revolution was birthed in a indiscriminate blood bath… against a feudal aristocracy… but heck, they like adminstrative feudalism now]
How soon we forget that the Reagan administration, with some help from conservative Democrats, overcame liberals in congress who sought to block aid to Pakistan because intelligence showed the country was developing a nuclear weapon.
Yes, memories ARE short. Actually, US intelligence(the CIA) did NOT present Pakistan as developing a nuclear capability. Just the opposite. In fact, without exception the CIA has been wrong, beginning with the Soviets, about EVERY country that has EVER developed nuclear weapons. To now include Iran. The history of the CIA has been of hostility to administrations they should have been serving, incompetence, or both, for many years.
The comment above comes under the common tactic of claiming the US is responsible for every bad actor on the world stage. Which is a variation of the cherished Progressive Blame America meme.
Yes, the aid wasn’t handed directly to bin Laden. This is why I wrote: “and his ilk.”
To the above writer the US is supposed to look into a crystal ball and SEE that OBL, an obscure individual at the time, would become a terrorist in the future. The US is asked by implication to identify ALL the bad actors even before they play their roles.
In debate one can always rely on a fervent declaration from Progressive quarters that the US ‘created’ any murderer. To the Progressive mind the US is responsible for ALL perfidy that might occur, not the real perpetrators, no matter how tenuous the connection.
.
And the question is: what are we doing about it? I heard on POTUS08 the other day that the leftie bloggers are organized and out getting the vote for Obama. McCain is struggling to find funding. If the right can’t get behind McCain and give him equal support, we will likely be looking at 4 years of Carter II.
“How soon we forget … “
What the Progressives can’t remember, or can’t grasp, is that ALL regimes in the Middle East, with the exception of Israel and Turkey, came to their ascendance through force of arms.
The gamut runs from monarchy to theocracy to dictator. Historically, if the US has dealt with any Middle Eastern nation, it has necessarily and routinely dealt with unsavory regimes. The US could hardly do otherwise considering the prolificacy of Middle Eastern despots and the historical scarcity of Middle Eastern democracy.
McCain is struggling to find funding.
On the other hand, even with meager funding McCain is effectively carrying out a debate over Iran with Obama. After the conventions when official campaigning begins I suspect there may be more parity between the McCain and Obama campaign funds.
“Carter II” So right.
Gray claims: “OBL’s viability as a terrorist was damaged by the successes of the indigenous mujahideen we were arming and training.”
Why then, was it necessary to remove the Pashtun-dominated Taliban government after the 9/11 attacks that bin Laden, not the mujahideen-led Taliban, conducted?
It’s fun, though, to see neoconservatives arguing that Al Qaeda is a rogue radical faction among disparate tribal Islamic fundamentalists groups. Usually, they are arguing just the opposite: that all Islamists are evil terrorists.
Gray is certainly correct to point out the importance to draw distinctions between the various Islamic factions and to note that many are opposed to one another.
Like all extremist movements, radical Islam is deeply divided. That’s probably its biggest weakness, along with the suicidal bent of its military tactics.