In Sam Cooke’s classic 1959 hit “Wonderful World,” the lyrics downplayed formal learning with lines like, “Don’t know much about history … Don’t know much about geography.” Over a half-century after Cooke wrote that lighthearted song, such ignorance is now all too real. Even our best and brightest — or rather our elites especially — are not too familiar with history or geography.
Both disciplines are the building blocks of learning. Without awareness of natural and human geography, we are reduced to a sort of self-contained void without accurate awareness of the space around us. An ignorance of history also creates the same sort of self-imposed exile, leaving us ignorant of both what came before us and what is likely to follow. (See Einstein, Albert and Santayana, George)
In the case of geography, Harvard Law School graduate Barack Obama recently lectured that, “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, 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. (Just like the rest of him!)
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 for that matter, he 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 like geography and history. The former is often not taught any more as a required subject in our schools and colleges. The latter has often been redefined as race, class and gender oppression 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 the Texas had historically been Republican — while in reality it was a mostly Jim Crow Democratic state for over a century. Republicans only started consistently carrying Texas 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 and trade are 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 that such a graduate 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.
Which makes the subject of this next item from the Daily Caller even more disturbing:
We can do this without Congress’: Obama working to unilaterally impose tax on cell phones
One President with a pen can steal more than every man with a gun in the history of the world.
President Barack Obama is looking to unilaterally impose a $5-per-year tax on all cellphone users to avoid asking a recalcitrant Congress for funding… The Federal Communications Commission, an independent agency headed by three Obama appointees, would collect the tax, tacking on an additional charge to devices already subject to local, state and federal fees, along with sales taxes.
Obama hopes to rake in enough funds for a project called ConnectED that will cost taxpayers billions: expanding high-speed Internet access in classrooms across the country so that 99 percent of public school students can freely access the Internet. Obama administration officials promise that the tax would end in three years after the FCC filled its coffers with $6 billion, but gave no details on how the government would prevent potential cost overruns or measure the program’s progress.
Deputy White House press secretary John Earnest denied that the move was an “end run” around Congress in a press briefing Wednesday, but added that Congress’s “dysfunctional” state could justify an executive override.
With somewhat uncharacteristic understatement, the New York Post reported…
“Administration officials said the added fee would sunset after three years after generating about $6 billion. But critics worry it would continue forever.”
The “critics”…and everyone else actually footing the bill for their own cell phone…would do well to worry; because when it comes to Liberals spending your tax dollars on their Progressive policies…
The fact dramatically-increased per-pupil spending and computerized classrooms have had no discernible impact on teaching Little Johnny the “Three R’s” notwithstanding.
In other news of the most scandal-ridden Administration in the nation’s history, in apparent imitation of another Obamao executive forced from office, it seems…
Lerner Used Personal Email for IRS Business
The Oversight Committee wants Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner to turn over emails sent from her personal account that they say may pertain to her official duties at the IRS. A letter sent Tuesday by Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa and Rep. Jim Jordan, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Economic, Job Creation and Regulatory Affairs, requests that Lerner turn over emails sent to or from her personal “msn.com” email address that might pertain to their investigation into the IRS’s inappropriate scrutiny of groups based on their political leanings.
Lerner headed the unit of the IRS charged with dealing with those tax-exempt organizations.
“Through the course of the investigation, we have learned that you sent documents related to your official duties from your official IRS e-mail account to an msn.com e-mail account labeled ‘Lois Home,'” the letter says. “This raises some serious questions concerning your use of a non-official e-mail account to conduct official business.”
Issa and Jordan requested that she turn over any such emails sent between January 1, 2008 and now related to her official duties that might be in personal email accounts, saying that such documents might be relevant to their ongoing investigation. The use of a personal email, the congressmen write, also raises issues of compliance with the Freedom of Information Act and “frustrates congressional oversight obligations.”
The investigation has faded from the center stage over the past several weeks, but new revelations are reviving the scandal.
Faded? Only because it’s tough to cover every one of the Chicago Machine’s criminal acts at once!
And what better way to misdirect the public’s attention from serious scandals than to fabricate a furor, as Bret Baier reports:
Don’t Show Me
The Missouri State Fair apparently has a zero tolerance policy for making fun of President Obama. A rodeo clown who wore a President Obama mask has been banned for life and the president of the state association has resigned. This follows outrage from a skit in which a bull chased the Obama-masked clown to the cheers of the crowd. All the other rodeo clowns are headed to sensitivity training.
Some people have called the skit racist. The NAACP is calling for funding to the state fair to be pulled. It is also asking the Department of Justice and Secret Service to investigate.
A very different reaction — or lack thereof — in 1994. A dummy wearing a George H. W. Bush mask, was destroyed by a bull at a rodeo in New Jersey. Buried at the bottom of a Philadelphia Inquirer article about the event — quote — “Then the bull saw the George Bush dummy. He tore into it, sending the rubber mask flying halfway across the sand.” No reports of outrage, firings, or sensitivity training following that rodeo.
As Rush Limbaugh noted…
But since a picture’s worth a thousand words, we’ll let this one sent by Balls Cotton speak for us:
Put another way…
And in Tales From the Darkside, courtesy of Walt Meisen, USA Today offers the latest bit of legislative insanity Progressives are promoting:
Should more states require racial impact statements for new laws?
Most states evaluate new legislation for how it might affect the economy or the environment, but what about measuring a law’s effect on minorities?
Earlier this month, Oregon became the third state to require racial impact statements for any changes to state criminal laws or sentencing codes. Any new criminal justice proposal must be evaluated if at least one member of each party requests a report. The report, produced by a sentencing commission or legislative analyst, must show how a proposed law could have consequences for sentencing, probation or parole policies affecting minorities disproportionately, and that information is shared with lawmakers before they vote on the bill.
Iowa and Connecticut require racial impact statements before lawmakers can vote on any new criminal laws, and Minnesota’s sentencing commission regularly drafts racial impact statements for new legislation.
After all, who would want to tie proportionality to a specific minority’s percentage of perpetrators, rather than their fraction of the population as a whole?!?
In a related item, courtesy of TLJ:
On the Lighter Side…
Finally, we’ll call it a week with the Entertainment Section:
Shakira’s amazing body secrets
One word: G-E-N-E-T-I-C-S!
Magoo
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.