**
Dr. Eowyn posted: " At a campaign event in Beaverton, Oregon, on May 9,
2008, Barack Obama said: "It is just wonderful to be back in Oregon. In the
last 15 months we've traveled to every corner of the United States. I've
now been to 57 states, I think. One left to go" Respond to this post by
replying above this line
New post on *Fellowship of the Minds*
<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/author/eowyn2/> Obama is a
geography & history
idiot<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2013/09/05/obama-is-a-geography-history-idiot/>
by
Dr. Eowyn <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/author/eowyn2/>
[image: 58
states]<http://fellowshipofminds.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/58-states.jpg>
At a campaign event in Beaverton, Oregon, on May 9, 2008, Barack Obama said:
* "It is just wonderful to be back in Oregon. In the last 15 months we've
traveled to every corner of the United States. I've now been to 57 states,
I think. One left to go."*
This is the man setting America's foreign policy and hell-bent on bombing
Syria -- assuming he even knows where Syria is.
God help us.
*~Eowyn*
*From a Victor Davis Hanson essay of Aug. 15, 2013, "Don’t Know Much About
Geography<http://www.nationalreview.com/article/355786/dont-know-much-about-geography-victor-davis-hanson>
":*
Today’s leaders are totally ignorant of what used to be the building blocks
of learning. [...]
Without awareness of natural and human geography, we are reduced to a
self-contained void without accurate awareness of the space around us. An
ignorance of history creates the same sort of self-imposed exile, leaving
us ignorant of both what came before us and what is likely to follow.
In the case of geography, *Harvard Law School graduate Barack Obama
recently lectured, “If we don’t deepen our ports all along the Gulf —
places like Charleston, South Carolina; or Savannah, Georgia; or
Jacksonville, Florida . . . ” The problem is that all the examples he cited
are cities on the East Coast, not the Gulf of Mexico. *If Obama does not
know where these ports are, how can he deepen them?
Obama’s geographical confusion has become habitual. *He once claimed that
he had been to all “57 states.” He also assumed that Kentucky was closer to
Arkansas than it was to his adjacent home state of Illinois.*
*In reference to the Falkland Islands [off the coast of Argentina in South
America], President Obama called them the Maldives — islands southwest of
India* — apparently in a botched effort to use the Argentine-preferred
“Malvinas.” The two island groups may sound somewhat alike, but they are
continents apart. Again, without basic geographical knowledge, the
president’s commentary on the Falklands is rendered superficial.
*When in the state of Hawaii, Obama announced that he was in “Asia.”
He*lamented that the U.S. Army’s Arabic-language translators assigned
to Iraq
could better be used in Afghanistan, *failing to recognize that Arabic
isn’t the language of Afghanistan. And he also apparently thought Austrians
speak a language other than German.*
The president’s geographical illiteracy is a symptom of the nation’s
growing ignorance of once-essential subjects such as geography and history.
The former is not taught any more as a required subject in many of our
schools and colleges. The latter has often been redefined as race, class,
and gender oppression so as to score melodramatic points in the present
rather than to learn from the tragedy of the past.
*The president in his 2009 Cairo speech credited the European Renaissance
and Enlightenment to Islam’s “light of learning” — an exaggeration if not
an outright untruth* on both counts.
Closer to home, *the president claimed in 2011 that Texas had historically
been Republican — while in reality it was a mostly Jim Crow Democratic
state for over a century.* Republicans started consistently carrying Texas
only after 1980.
*Recently, Obama claimed that 20th-century Communist strongman Ho Chi Minh
“was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and
Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson.” *That pop assertion is
improbable, given that *Ho systematically liquidated his opponents,
slaughtered thousands in land-redistribution schemes, and brooked no
dissent.*
Even more ahistorical was Vice President *Joe Biden’s suggestion that
George W. Bush should have gone on television in 2008 to address the nation
as President Roosevelt had done in 1929 — a time when there was neither a
President Roosevelt nor televisions available for purchase.* In 2011, a
White House press kit confused Wyoming with Colorado — apparently because
they’re both rectangular-shaped states out West.
Our geographically and historically challenged leaders are emblematic of
disturbing trends in American education that include a similar erosion in
grammar, English composition, and basic math skills.
The controversial *Lois Lerner, a senior official at the IRS — an agency
whose stock in trade is numbers — claimed that she was “not good at math”
when she admitted that she did not know that one-fourth of 300 is 75.*
*In the zero-sum game of the education curriculum, each newly added
therapeutic discipline eliminated an old classical one.* The result is that
if Americans emote more and have more politically correct thoughts on the
environment, race, class, and gender, they are less able to advance their
beliefs through fact-based knowledge.
Despite supposedly tough new standards and vast investments, *about 56
percent of students in recent California public-school tests did not
perform up to their grade levels in English. Only about half met their
grade levels in math. *
A degree from our most prestigious American university is no guarantee a
graduate holding such a credential will know the number of states or the
location of Savannah. If we wonder why the Ivy League–trained Obama seems
confused about where cities, countries, and continents are, we might
remember that* all but one Ivy League university eliminated their geography
departments years ago.*
As a rule now, when our leaders allude to a place or an event in the past,
just assume their references are dead wrong.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University.
*Dr. Eowyn <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/author/eowyn2/>* |
September 5, 2013 at 5:32 am | Tags: California pubic school test
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Lerner <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=lois-lerner> |
Categories: Education <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=15005908>,
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