An intellectual?
By what standard can anyone apply that term to that man? The same friend never used the word to describe Bill Clinton, a Rhodes scholar. But he wants me to believe that it applies to a self-described "indifferent student" who somehow got into Columbia (cough cough affirmative action cough cough) and who went on to accomplish precisely nothing outside the realm of relentless self-promotion.
His two books were both autobiographies, the continuing story of Me Me Me, and he was mysteriously well-recompensed for their production. Somehow, neither autobio found room to mention his epic 1981 jaunt to Pakistan, a military dictatorship which was (at the time) the target of a State Department travel warning. There, he was housed by a wealthy power broker with CIA connections, at the express request of one of those CIA guys.
That's an accomplishment of sorts, I suppose -- but it is not an intellectual accomplishment. An intelligence accomplishment, let us call it. And one day we shall know the truth about just what it was that young Barry got up to back in 1981.
You could argue that our current President is an intellectual when compared to drooling Dubya. So what? By that standard, my dog Bella is an intellectual.
To be fair, we know that George W. Bush has, in his life, read two books: The New Testament and L'Etranger, by Camus, which our former Fearless Leader ludicrously described as a cautionary tale about what happens when you don't have Jayzuss in your life. I've seen no evidence that Barry has read those two books, or any two books beyond the two he allegedly wrote.
(Some say that he did not write them -- a theory which would explain why he does not allow us to see any of the papers he scribbled during his schooling. The book trade is, of course, a common way of making pay-offs.)
Ted Rall arugues that Barack Obama is the continuation of, not the antidote to, George W. Bush.
He promises to create 4 million new jobs by 2011. But we're currently losing 4 million jobs every five months. If Obama delivers, 25 million Americans will have lost their jobs by 2011. (The math differential is due to the fact that population growth increases the workforce by 2.8 million jobs annually.) With unemployment figures like that, no one will doubt that we're in a real Depression: breadlines, suicides, the whole bit.
Obama's goons (they're his now) will keep torturing the detainees for at least another year. Some detainees may still be subjected to kangaroo courts.
Meanwhile, the Bush Administration creeps who personally ordered the murder and torture of innocents kidnapped by the military, including young children, will not face prosecution.
During the campaign, Obama promised there would be "no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens." He has since changed his mind. Obama will keep the USA-Patriot Act. Habeas corpus, eliminated by the Military Commissions Act, won't come back.
The antiwar types have thrown away their signs. The sight of the first black president has the fair weather pacifists goo-goo-ga-gaing over a man who plans to transfer U.S. occupation troops and the carnage they bring from Iraq to Afghanistan.
Moreover, the war against Afghanistan is even less winnable than Iraq. At a time when we can least afford foreign adventurism, Obama plans to pour billions of dollars and thousands of lives into an Afghan charnel house with no prospect of victory.Yeah, but who cares? He's an intellectual. Thinks deep thoughts. And he's black. Black people are inherently cooler than other people.
I predict that, around the time the thermometer hits the 100 degree mark, the cool will have vanished, in more ways than one. People will stop projecting what they want to see onto this Rorshach blot. They will see this administration for what it really is: The corruption after the corruption.
Andrew Johnson was accused of patronage and interference in elections. People breathed a sigh of relief when Grant took over. But that's when the real problem hit.
17 comments:
But Grant was a masterful writer (much better than Bukowski, far better than most POTUSes).
Thank you!! I've never gotten the constant fawning over Obama's supposedly vast intellect. He's NO Clinton (either one but especially Bill) in the brains department, and not in the same league as, say, Al Gore.
Even my eminently sane (before she drank the Kool-Aid) and saintly mother, when I asked her what she liked about the O, responded, "He went to Harvard! And his wife went to Columbia!" Yeesh.
I think of him the way a lot of people think of Madonna: A minimally talented person who is superb at self-marketing. For the record I think Madonna IS talented, and possibly smarter than the POTUS too.
one of the few I have left
Friends just want to cheer you up, and that takes all the fun out of being grumpy.
It's this really weird idea, popular on the East Coast, that if you have graduated from an Ivy League school, intellect is automatically confirmed. Sure Bush II was Ivy League, but he was the exception proving the rule.
The eastern establishment has never understood the vast majority of the country doesn't give a rat's ass about what school somebody has attended.
Keep in mind, these are people who think South Park is brilliant.
Oh Perry. If you only knew.
(C, I didn't put him up to that one. Honest. It came out of the blue.)
Thanks for having the guts to speak the truth. The Prez is an average intellect with highly practiced bullshitting skills. He has an enormous ego and is very vain for which I have not figured out exactly why. The cool part is also practiced and he seems quite dorky. There is a reason he will not release his academic records and it isn't because he is so modest.
LOL, Perry. Indeed.
The only really tangible "good" reason to go to an Ivy League school is if you want to work at a big fat big-bucks law firm. They tend to screen heavily by law school (and then of course, standing in law school, law review etc.). I used to know one person who managed to get in at one of these firms despite going to a no-name law school but he was an unusual guy and definitely the exception to the rule. There may be other fields where this is true?
Other than that, I suppose the real value would be in the connections you could make -- Bill Clinton is a good example, with his socioeconomic background he would never have made the connections necessary for a political career without going to the Ivies.
On Obama's schooling:
Despite exclusive private schools and (so he says) a lot of hard work, he had to go to Occidental, which - so I am told - is a place where rich kids who don't initially have the grades to get into the Ivy League go to pad their transcripts. So he gets into Columbia, but even though - by his own admission - his grades there weren't very good, he somehow manages to leapfrog the better-qualified 90%+ of applicants and gets into Harvard.
and who went on to accomplish precisely nothing outside the realm of relentless self-promotion.
I've noted elsewhere that - in addition to mostly failing at school, Obama has failed at every job he's ever had:
As a lawyer: went to work at a law firm whose primary focus was keeping slumlords out of jail, rarely argued a case (only case he won that I know of was because the other party wanted to lose). (I count those as failures).
Annenberg Challenge: students who were under his auspices got lower grades than those who were not.
Community organizing: Quit because he couldn't make political chamge where others in the same position could.
Woods Fund: poverty money went to slumlord-shielding ex-boss (I also count this as a failure).
IL State Senate: sat on his butt until his last year when two dozen bills - all the work for which had been done by other legislators - were handed to him on a silver platter by Emil Jones to sign his name to. Meanwhile his constituents in the slums of the South Side got continually worse off due to his funnelling of poverty monies to his slumlord pal Rezko.
US Senate: no legislation of signficance passed (got Congress to agree to 'promote democracy' - whatever that means - in the Congo, and renamed a post office).
Anon: It looks as if Obama - like Bush - has Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Some characteristics: exaggerating one's accomplishments (IL State and US Sen. records), blaming others for one's own failures (WV, KY residents and whoever doesn't vote for me is a racist), and treating others as mere stepping-stones for one's own ambitions (Wright, Rezko, progessives, the antiwar movement, etc.).
Sergei Rostov
"Keep in mind, these are people who think South Park is brilliant."
OMG...From the Deep Truth that "twice a day even a stopped clock is accurate" comes an insightful and witty remark from Perry!!! Whoa. Good one. You're due one more!
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Joseph...thanks for this post. I don't know which is worse. People who think Obama is an intellect...or those who think his excruciating, fake Southern preacher cheesy delivery makes him a "skilled orator."
Sergei, I am told that Oxy is good in the sciences. Which might explain much, except that Obama was not a science guy. It has the rep, in Los Angeles, of being the private college rich kids go to when they don't have the grades demanded by Tommy Trojan. (That is, USC.)
They have perfectly good schools in HI. Obi went mainland in order to chase a girl who lived in Brentwood. Or so he says. I would still like to know more about THAT.
Oh, talk about the nanny state.
Just don't post me at all if you're going to post half my comment.
And to protect the likes of the ninny Perry???
lol. Pathetic, Mr. Nanny Goat.
Sergei I think that was an excellent summation of our Preznit's hollow "accomplishments." He's so much like Dubya it's astonishing; only the style and packaging differ.
While 'intellectual' as a noun doesn't apply to BHO, it probably does as an adjective.
Normally, when there isn't a pre-existing animus pressing down on the scales of judgment, Obama's graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law would be enough to establish those bona fides. Heading up the Law Review would also similarly qualify. Teaching Constitutional law at the University of Chicago is another such marker in his early career.
Persons of merely average or slightly above average intelligence do not achieve any of those things.
XI
Having positions, attaining higher positions seems to be his talent. Doing anything note worthy while in any of those positions is what is missing...logic tells me that they are missing and not shown because they don't exist.
On Obama's Harvard grades [from the WSJ Sep 11th 2008]:
"At Harvard Law School, Obama graduated Magna Cum Laude, which, according to the Havard Law School website, is awarded to the top 10% of Harvard Law School students."
We don't know where Obama falls in this range; it could be as low as a mid-range B
or even lower. Since he refuses without explanation to release his Harvard grades, we don't know.
And on his time in the HLR :
First, how did he get in? Since he won't release his records from Harvard, we don't know, but :
"Fourteen editors (two from each 1L section) are selected based on a combination of their first-year grades and their competition scores. Twenty editors are selected based solely on their competition scores. The remaining editors are selected on a discretionary basis. Some of these discretionary slots may be used to implement the Review’s affirmative action policy." [harvardlawreview.org]
He may have been one of those "discretionary" selections. If he had gotren in based on merit, that would be something to be proud of, so why not prove it by releasing his records?
"Obama was also elected President of the Law Review, which according to a Harvard Law spokesperson is not based at all on academics, but on other measures as would occur in any club." [WSJ, same as above]
On his teaching position at the U of C:
"Mr. Obama arrived at the law school in 1991 thanks to Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge. As president of The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Obama had impressed Mr. McConnell with editing suggestions on an article; on little more than that, the law school gave him a fellowship, which amounted to an office and a computer, which he used to write his memoir, 'Dreams From My Father.'"
[New York Times July 30, 2008]
So on the strength of not even any actual editing, but mere editing *suggestions* and the patronage of a conservative scholar) he got a teaching job at one of the best law schools in the world.
In conclusion, what we don't know - because he refuses to tell us - has the result of these things being no indication of how intelligent he may or may not be.
Sergei Rostov
p.s. On the subject of self-promotion, much has been made of how the Obama campaign patterned its logo after that of Pepsi ("the face of a new generation"). Since I'm not much of a soda drinker, it took me until a few days ago to see one of the new Pepsi cans and notice that they have in turn altered their logo to more resemble that of Obama's campaign.
Addendum (/somewhat of a correction :)) re Harvard grades: CBS News [Nov 11 2001?] reports that in 1985 ( around Obama's time at Harvard), 33.2% of Harvard grads received grades of A or A-minus, so it is almost certain that he did make high grades (unless Harvard either made a mistake in awarding him his MCL or did it falsely and asked him to cover it up, which I *very* much doubt, but include as a possibility). However, the article also indicates that this high percentage is mostly due to grade inflation, so even knowing that he likely did make high grades without having a good cross section of his work (or what have you) doesn't prove anything one way or the other as regards his intelligence, which is unfortunate.
(Shame on Harvard, and every other school that inflates grades, as they are not only doing an injustice to those students who earn their grades, but are also helping to keep the US from realizing the Founding Fathers' dream of "an aristocracy of achievement arising from a democracy of opportunity.")
Sergei Rostov
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