Father Brown (G K Chesterton) solved crimes by looking for clues about a person in some of the tiniest things they say and do.
For instance, we all know politicians tend to lie. But as a rule, they lie about things that matter, as the way a man lies about the lipstick on his collar, or Barney Frank about the prostitution ring being run out his townhouse. Self-preservation. CYA.
But when Bill Clinton said he could remember the church burnings in Arkansas when there weren’t any, or Hillary said she was named after St Edmund Hillary when in fact she was born before his feat, we are told something altogether different. Both were off-the-cuff remarks that no staffer could possibly had researched and written for them. They were made up on the spot. Gratuitous lies, for really no apparent reason.
Therein lies pathologies that Father Brown could use to track down a crime, or in this case, a person’s true nature.
For you see, the Clintons’ generation, my generation, has a passion for wanting to appear as if we were a little closer to history than we actually were, that we were more relevant than we actually were. Just count the many politicians who faked Vietnam war or military service to enhance their political standing?
Bill wanted the world to think he was passionate about civil rights in his high school years when all he really ever thought about was sex with girls with high hair. (Herman Cain has recently come under attack for admitting that the civil rights movement wasn’t the center of his life either when he was in high school. Only he was chastised for telling the truth about those days, while Bill was excused for telling a self-serving lie.)
The truth is, most kids turned off formal learning somewhere around 10th grade, when the hormones kicked in, and returned to the real world around their second year of college, or, when they shipped out to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Never misunderestimate the pecking order in the culture between those who served (were part of history) and those who didn’t. In the top tier of that pecking order sat the Combat Infantryman’s Badge (the CIB) and at the bottom, Bill Clinton, who, all his life wanted to find a war that required no training, no sweat, and no risks which he could magnify as his own heroic reality in history.
While Barack Obama lies, I can’t see a pathological streak as I do in Bill Clinton, but he does expose certain other pathologies.
Namely, that he ain’t real bright. And never has been.
And this can be seen from all the things he doesn’t know that any ordinary kid growing up, from C-students to “I got a scholarship to Harvard” A-students.
Note: I’m leaving the Cal Tech-MIT brainiacs out of this discussion here, for math and science wizards often did live inside a cocoon, impervious to the outside world. But they also left a trail of accomplishments going back as early as elementary school showcasing their march forward, which eludes Obama.
Barack Obama was ordinary as a kid, so nothing explains his sprouting into an intellectual super star. A media superstar, sure. That’s easy. But intellectuals have to leave bread crumbs.
Every kid gets through 6th grade with a body of knowledge he is taught there (at least in those days), in part because it is driven into them…I remember watching Luther Brock struggle with his 7’s, 8’s and 9’s multiplication tables…because teacher made him stand at the blackboard until he could do it, if only that one time.
In those formative years kids picked up stuff just by hanging around. And what they picked up were smatterings of American government (civics), American history, world history, Geography and science. It wasn’t all Ricky Nelson and American Bandstand. If you’re my age you can all make a list of basic knowledge, from George Washington, to Bunker Hill, the Alamo, to the First and Fifth Amendments (everyone knew how to plead the Fifth by 9th grade), to Alaska and Hawaii (new states then) to Knute Rockne, to how to do a couple of science tricks from Don Herbert (Mr Wizard), that you just sort of picked up in school until the 10th grade, when the sweet aroma of cheap perfume completely overcame you and you didn’t wake up until four years later.
We all had heroes and heroines, from the star football player, to JFK, to Alan Shepherd and Gus Grissom. And to the last kid, we all would punch your lights out if you ever said anything bad about our mother or America.
So, we all know that ordinary world awareness is a combination of listening and observing, not just reading and studying for a test.
But in Barack Obama, we see none of this.
To listen to him now you’d swear he never did very well in any of those subjects even in 5th grade. Do you really think, if you caught him off guard, he’d actually know what Edmund Hillary did?
Did you see that 11-second pause by Herman Cain on Libya? Catch Obama off guard and ask him to name the capital of Philadelphia and see how long it takes him to get the joke. I am quite certain that five years ago Barack Obama could not find Libya on a map. Or tell you what continent it sits in, as he sure as hell doesn’t know which continent Hawaii sits on today. And he was born there. (They say.)
While foreign affairs is not Herman Cain’s strong suite, I am quite certain he has read more books than Barack Obama, from 6th grade on, and could get a higher grade tomorrow if given a pop quiz/standard 6th grade test on any subject, from history, to government, to science and geography.
I’ll wager on it.
So, Obama is not a smart guy.
If he is, let someone step forward and prove it.
Obama is beginning to lose backers in the media Left, witness Chris Matthews. Look for others. But also watch for this, as all will do the same thing. They will insist that Barack is a genius, and being president, and all that entails; leading a nation, working hard fifteen hours day, with a couple days off each month, is just too far beneath him and his skill sets. This is their attempt to try to weasel out of their own personal missed assessments of Obama. It is their own vanities at stake here. They can’t afford to be poor judges of horse flesh, or in this case, horses’ arses. So instead, they must define him as a miscast Einstein, a physicist, when in fact, Einstein knew who the Princeton Heisman Trophy winner was in 1952. A fellow named Dick Kazmaier (Look him up, one of my heroes).
They try to portray Obama as if he were a prodigy forced to sit through 9th grade Algebra while trying to work out the the Hodge conjecture (a major unsolved problem in algebraic geometry) in his head, while it’s clear he struggled in all those subjects.
I’m not in a position to question Obama’s IQ, but neither are his supporters able to defend it. But Barack Obama is as dumb as a rock in both life experiences and basic education. And he is lazy, hates work, indeed is scared to death of it, and lives only to serve his own pleasures, and whims.
If I’m wrong, show me.
If he were such a genius in college and law school, then why didn’t it show up in 6th grade instead of when he snuck into Harvard? 6th grade geniuses didn’t get to by-pass History, Civics and Geography. They just gobbled up the information quicker and finished the tests faster. They still had to do term papers, essays, book reports. They couldn’t just come in and say “Present.”
I’m not asking for a paper trail here, just some demonstration that the kid could even keep up with Luther Brock. He sure doesn’t sound like it today.
What I am saying that Barack Obama seems pretty average or below, for he can recall nothing of life that the average C-student could report about anything.
Aloof or stupid?
They look almost the same, if you stop to think about it, except you rarely see stupid dressed out well, standing on a podium, reading from a teleprompter. It’s one of those hiding in plain sight events that can fool us. One of my favorite side-characters in fiction was a fellow in a town in Maine during the Revolutionary War, who the townspeople elected mayor simply because he always looked like he was in deep thought. Which a mule does likewise.
Like the Clintons’ lies, it’s the little things that are telling about Barack Obama. I’ll leave the 57 states comment alone, as that may be something else altogether. But that Hawaii is in Asia? Make up your own reason why he might have not known, but clearly, he didn’t do well in 6th grade Geography.
As for “corpsman,” again, the fact is, he obviously had never heard the word spoken before he read it off the teleprompter, which is sin enough. Also, he obviously did not rehearse his comments. “Corpsman” was common in my generation, but not from books but from pop culture, for it was part of dozens of WWII movies I watched as kid; Army Air Corpse, Marine Corpse, Navy corpseman. You’re telling me, at 50 you never heard this world spoken?
Finally, there was Af-ganny-stan, and Pahki-Stahn. Having gone to Pakistan as a kid in college (probably on a non-American passport) he would of course know how the Paki’s said it, which they got from the Brits. So, why then the utter incongruity of Af-ganny-stan, unless he had never heard that name spoken out loud, and never made the connection that they were Islamic neighbors. Herman Cain, call your office.
A total composite of Barack Obama is difficult to portray. Lady Penguin, in several articles, has tried to work up a psychological profile of this man-child. I agree with what she writes, the narcissism, the aloof indifference, the spoiled bratiness, and a deep depression, which is probably treated with drugs.
Last year I wrote that Obama had met his match when confronting his greatest fear; Work. Like good looks, certain kinds of stupidity are not incongruous with narcissism. Neither is a fear of work.
All I have here are some Father Brown-like observations, tiny bits of evidence from which I have drawn certain conclusions. If anyone wants to contradict me with a greater body of facts, please step forward. But all you have now is a man who can be taught to stand up erect, carry himself in a suit well, and make speeches (sent out over a teleprompter), which GB Shaw, in Pygmalion, proved you could do with a flower-girl named Eliza Doolittle.
If he knows deep things, let him show us those things. If the Constitution is a body of negative rights, let him tell us, and defend, the underlying principles that say that this is a bad thing. For again, I can teach a flower-girl to say what he says, and provide 100 C-students to contest it.
So then, that this is a man who is not too smart.
If I’m wrong, prove it.
