Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Sowell Slams Clueless Obama Big Time

Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and former Lecturer in Economics, Howard University, writes:


After reading Barack Obama's book Dreams from My Father, it became painfully clear that he has not been searching for the truth, because he assumed from an early age that he had already found the truth – and now it was just a question of filling in the details and deciding how to change things.

Obama did not simply happen to encounter a lot of people on the far left fringe during his life. As he spells out in his book, he actively sought out such people. There is no hint of the slightest curiosity on his part about other visions of the world that might be weighed against the vision he had seized upon.

As Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School has pointed out, Obama made no effort to take part in the marketplace of ideas with other faculty members when he was teaching a law course there. What would be the point, if he already knew the truth and knew that they were wrong?

This would be a remarkable position to take, even for a learned scholar who had already spent decades canvassing a vast amount of information and views on many subjects. But Obama was already doctrinaire at a very early age – and ill-informed or misinformed on both history and economics.


His statement in "Dreams from My Father" about how white men went to Africa to "drag away the conquered in chains" betrays his ignorance of African history.

The era of the Atlantic slave trade and the era of European conquests across the continent of Africa were different eras. During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, most of Africa was ruled by Africans, who sold some of their slaves to white men.

European conquests in Africa had to wait until Europeans found some way to survive lethal African diseases, to which they lacked resistance. Only after medical science learned to deal with these diseases could the era of European conquests spread across sub-Saharan Africa. But the Atlantic slave trade was over by then.

There was no reason why Barack Obama had to know this. But there was also no reason for him to be shooting off his mouth without knowing what he was talking about.

Similarly with Obama's characterization of the Nile as "the world's greatest river." The Nile is less than 10 percent longer than the Amazon, but the Amazon delivers more than 50 times as much water into the Atlantic as the Nile delivers into the Mediterranean. The Nile could not accommodate the largest ships, even back in Roman times, much less the aircraft carriers of today that can sail up the Hudson River and dock in midtown Manhattan.

When Obama wrote that many people "had been enslaved only because of the color of their skin," he was repeating a common piece of gross misinformation. For thousands of years, people enslaved other people of the same race as themselves, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa or the Western Hemisphere.

Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before the first African was brought in bondage to the Western Hemisphere. The very word "slave" is derived from the name of a European people once widely held in bondage, the Slavs.

Read the rest here.

3 comments:

  1. I generally agree with Sowell that there isn't a lot of nuance and sophistication to Obama's view of the world. Ideologically speaking, Obama is your boilerplate leftist.

    But I also think Sowell lets Obama off way too easy. While Obama no doubt holds a narrow and simplistic leftist worldview, he also sees himself as very much as part of the power elite.

    As a politician, Obama is very cynical. He will say and do things quite contrary to leftist ideology, if he sees it as politically advantageous to himself. Consider, for instance, the issue of gay marriage. In 1996, when Obama was running for high political office, he was on record as supporting gay marriage. In 2008, when Obama was running for President--and polling was not favorable to gay marriage, he was now against gay marriage. In 2012, when polling on the issue shifted in favor of gay marriage, Obama has again changed his position, claiming his views have "evolved."

    In 2008, many libertarians, including myself, were foolishly sympathetic to his candidacy because Obama sold himself as the "peace candidate" (and the marketing of Obama was so good on this count, Obama even received the Nobel Peace Prize shortly after being elected President). But from the dramatic escalation of the war in Afghanistan to Bradley Manning to the illegal war in Libya to the NDAA to the continuing belligerence of the government on Iran, Obama's foreign policy and policies regarding civil liberties have not differed much from George Bush, his neoconservative predecessor, and many, such as the civil libertarian, Glen Greenwald, would argue Obama is worse than Bush on these things.

    Taking this into account, I would say first and foremost, Obama is NOT a leftist, he is part of the establishment, part of the elite; and, more than anything, he wants power, even if he has to sellout some aspects of his leftist ideology to do it.

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  2. Great comment Jon.

    If you took your comment and replaced "Obama" with "Julia Gillard", it would be a pretty accurate description of Australia's current leader as well. Gillard supposedly stood for many "boilerplate leftist" ideas before coming into power, yet her tenure has been fairly indistinguishable from the previous opposition leader, John Howard.

    Examples are 1) increasing detention of refugees, 2) ongoing commitment to Iraq and Afghanistan, 3) furthering federal powers to intercept communication, 4) opposition to gay marriage, 5) increasing Internet filtering.

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  3. Great comment Jon.

    If you took your comment and replaced "Obama" with "Julia Gillard", it would be a pretty accurate description of Australia's current leader as well. Gillard supposedly stood for many "boilerplate leftist" ideas before election, yet is fairly indistinguishable from the previous opposition leader, John Howard. 1) increasing detention of refugees, 2) ongoing commitment to Iraq and Afghanistan, 3) furthering federal powers to intercept communication, 4) opposition to gay marriage, 5) increasing Internet filtering

    ReplyDelete