STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES…. Over the last couple of years, it seemed like Barack Obama’s conservative detractors had thrown just about every criticism imaginable at the guy. If recent commentary on far-right blogs is any indication, they’ve come up with a new one: they’re convinced the president isn’t very bright.
Just to be clear, they’re talking about the current president.
Now, this always seemed like one of the few attacks the right would go out of its way to avoid. For one thing, they defended George W. Bush, despite his, shall we say, intellectual limitations. For another, I had assumed even die-hard Republicans would grudgingly acknowledge Obama’s intelligence, much the same way a liberal lawyer might reluctantly respect Justice John Roberts’ intellect, even while disagreeing with him on everything.
Apparently, though, that’s not the case, and quite a few of the leading far-right bloggers have convinced themselves that the president, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, is a dim bulb. Take this item, for example, published yesterday by Powerline’s John Hinderaker:
Everyone knows that Barack Obama is lost without his teleprompter, but his latest blunder, courtesy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, via the Corner, suggests that the teleprompter may not be enough unless it includes phonetic spellings. [Obama apparently mispronounced the name of the company “Orion”]
So evidently we have to add astronomy to history and economics as subjects of which Obama is remarkably ignorant. I’m beginning to fear that our President has below-average knowledge of the world. Not for a President, but for a middle-aged American.
Just in case there’s any doubt, there was no indication that Hinderaker was kidding or being deliberately ironic. (With conservative blogs, it’s often hard to tell.)
This is, of course, coming from the same blogger who was not only impressed by Sarah Palin’s intellectual prowess, but also once lauded George W. Bush as “a man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius.”
A.L. concluded, “The alternative universe that these folks manage to create for themselves is really quite something to behold…. What’s really sad is that Hinderaker is not alone in this belief. If you read the right wing blogs, it’s just an accepted fact that Obama is a moron. It’s as if they think that if they say it over and over again, it will somehow catch on with the public at large. ”
If that’s the goal, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it fails. Call it a hunch.
