Obama’s History Lesson

[John Adams]

Obama’s History Lesson
 



Future generations will laugh at us for taking him seriously.
 

 

By Mark Steyn
 

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O
ur lesson for today comes from George and Ira Gershwin:
 
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother
When they said that man could fly
They told Marconi wireless was a phony . . . 
 
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sang it in the film Shall We Dance? (1937). Seventy-five years on, the president revived it to tap dance around his rising gas prices and falling approval numbers. Delivering his big speech on energy at Prince George’s Community College, he insisted the American economy will be going gangbusters again just as soon as we start running it on algae and windmills. He noted that, as with Wilbur and his brother, there were those inclined to titter:
 
Let me tell you something. If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail — [Laughter] — they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society. [Laughter.] They would not have believed that the world was round. [Applause.] We’ve heard these folks in the past. They probably would have agreed with one of the pioneers of the radio who said, “Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan.” [Laughter.] One of Henry Ford’s advisers was quoted as saying, “The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a fad.” [Laughter.]
 

 

The crowd loved it. But President Algy Solyndra wasn’t done:

 
There always have been folks who are the naysayers and don’t believe in the future, and don’t believe in trying to do things differently. One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, “It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?” [Laughter.] That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore — [laughter and applause] — because he’s looking backwards. He’s not looking forwards. [Applause.] He’s explaining why we can’t do something, instead of why we can do something.
 
It fell to Nan Card of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio to inform the website Talking Points Memo that the quotation was apocryphal. Hayes had the first telephone in the White House, and the first typewriter, and Edison visited him to demonstrate the phonograph.
But obviously Rutherford B. Hayes isn’t as “forward-looking” as a 21st-century president who believes in Jimmy Carter malaise, 1970s Eurostatist industrial policy, 1940s British health-care reforms, 1930s New Deal–sized entitlements premised on mid-20th-century birth rates and life expectancy, and all paid for by a budget with more zeroes than anybody’s seen since the Weimar Republic. If that’s not a shoo-in for Mount Rushmore, I don’t know what is.
 
I was interested in the rest of Obama’s yukfest of history’s biggest idiots. Considering that he is (in the words of historian Michael Beschloss) “the smartest guy ever to become president,” the entire passage sounded as if it was plucked straight from one of those “Top Twenty Useful Quotes for Forward-Looking Inspirational Speakers” websites. And whaddayaknow? Rutherford B. Hayes, the TV flash in the pan, the horse is here to stay — they’re all at the Wikiquote page on “Incorrect Predictions.” Fancy that! You can also find his selected examples at the web page “Some Really Really Bad Predictions About the Future” and a bazillion others.
 
Given that the ol’ Hayes telephone sidesplitter turned out to be a bust, I wondered about the others. The line about television being a “flash in the pan” is generally attributed to “Mary Somerville, pioneer of radio educational broadcasts, 1948.” She was a New Zealand–born lass who while at Oxford wrote to the newly founded BBC with some ideas on using radio in schools. By the Seventies, the educational programming she had invented and developed was used in 90 percent of U.K. schools, and across the British Commonwealth from the Caribbean to Africa to the Pacific. She apparently used the flash-in-the-pan line in a private conversation recounted some years after her death by her fellow BBC executive, Grace Wyndham Goldie, a lady I knew very slightly. It was in the context of why she was pessimistic about early attempts at educational television. Mary Somerville would not have been surprised by [COLOR=#216221 !important][COLOR=#216221 !important]American [COLOR=#216221 !important]Idol[/COLOR][/COLOR][/COLOR][/FONT][/URL][/I] or Desperate Housewives, but she thought TV’s possibilities for scholarly study were limited. If you remember Leonard Bernstein giving live illustrated [COLOR=#216221 !important][COLOR=#216221 !important]music[/COLOR][/COLOR][/FONT] lectures on Beethoven on CBS in the Fifties, and you’ve lived long enough to see “quality public television” on PBS dwindle down to dreary boomer nostalgia, lousy Brit sitcoms, Laurence Welk reruns, and therapeutic infomercials, you might be inclined to agree that as an educational tool TV certainly proved “a flash in the pan.” And that’s before your grandkid gets home from school and complains he’s had to sit through Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth again.
 
 
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/293728/obama-s-history-lesson-mark-steyn

[John Adams]

[John Adams]

[John Adams]

[sweetwater5s9]

LOL...   Obama the fool...

[hoosier_daddy]

bush is the chickenshit that lied 4500 soldiers to their deaths in iraq, little bitch.  you got a cartoon for that?

[hoosier_daddy]

Reagan did once made a similar observation, according to Feb. 23, 1985, report by UPI. In this case, Reagan poked fun at his age, clearly making a joke:  Reagan recalled that President Rutherford B. Hayes once was “shown a recently invented device.”  “That's an amazing invention,” he said. “But who would ever want to use one of them?” He was talking about a telephone. I thought at the time that he might be mistaken.”
Of course, Reagan — “80 percent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation” — was widely mocked for getting his facts wrong. So we are not sure he is the best source for presidential history.

[sweetwater5s9]

Taking down Osama bin Laden was an achievement resulting from a culmination of a decade of national security policy. Soft power and diplomacy helped along the way, but it was hard power and military might that made it possible. President George W. Bush put the correct policies in place, including Gitmo and increased intelligence gathering. Obama was wise to continue executing many of President Bush's strategies.

[hoosier_daddy]

no, you are a lying bitch.  read bush's quotes above, if you can read.  and no torturing yielded any actionable evidence towards bin laden's capture, asshole.  fuck you and all the torture supporters.  move to the middle east...they allow that shit there...asshole...
 
“The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. We did not first learn from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the real name of bin Laden’s courier, or his alias, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — the man who ultimately enabled us to find bin Laden. The first mention of the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, as well as a description of him as an important member of Al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country. The United States did not conduct this detainee’s interrogation, nor did we render him to that country for the purpose of interrogation. We did not learn Abu Ahmed’s real name or alias as a result of waterboarding or any ‘enhanced interrogation technique’ used on a detainee in U.S. custody. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts, or an accurate description of his role in Al-Qaeda.
“In fact, not only did the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not provide us with key leads on bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed; it actually produced false and misleading information. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed specifically told his interrogators that Abu Ahmed had moved to Peshawar, got married, and ceased his role as an Al-Qaeda facilitator — which was not true, as we now know. All we learned about Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti through the use of waterboarding and other ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ against Khalid Sheik Mohammed was the confirmation of the already known fact that the courier existed and used an alias.
“I have sought further information from the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and they confirm for me that, in fact, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee — information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s real role in Al-Qaeda and his true relationship to Osama bin Laden — was obtained through standard, non-coercive means, not through any ‘enhanced interrogation technique.’
“In short, it was not torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees that got us the major leads that ultimately enabled our intelligence community to find Osama bin Laden. I hope former Attorney General Mukasey will correct his misstatement. It’s important that he do so because we are again engaged in this important debate, with much at stake for America’s security and reputation. Each side should make its own case, but do so without making up its own facts.
That was from today’s floor speech. In the Op-Ed, McCain went on to make the most important point about this debate:
As we debate how the United States can best influence the course of the Arab Spring, can’t we all agree that the most obvious thing we can do is stand as an example of a nation that holds an individual’s human rights as superior to the will of the majority or the wishes of government? Individuals might forfeit their life as punishment for breaking laws, but even then, as recognized in our Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, they are still entitled to respect for their basic human dignity, even if they have denied that respect to others.
All of these arguments have the force of right, but they are beside the most important point. Ultimately, this is more than a utilitarian debate. This is a moral debate. It is about who we are.
I don’t mourn the loss of any terrorist’s life. What I do mourn is what we lose when by official policy or official neglect we confuse or encourage those who fight this war for us to forget that best sense of ourselves. Through the violence, chaos and heartache of war, through deprivation and cruelty and loss, we are always Americans, and different, stronger and better than those who would destroy us.
I made a similar point last week, and the extent to which many on the right seem to have thrown the question of morality over the side in this debate is really quite disturbing, although it may not be surprising. The fact that something “works” (and the question of whether torture is a reliable method of intelligence gathering is something that doesn’t even to be worthy of debate on the right anymore) is irrelevant to the question of whether it’s right or wrong. There are a whole host of interrogation techniques we could undertake if we wanted to:
It may be theoretically possible that we could break a suspected terrorist by placing him a room with his child while a CIA operative put a loaded gun to the child’s head, threatening to kill them unless the suspect revealed what they knew. We could revive the medieval torture processes of the Inquisition. Those methods might even prove highly effective in getting a particularly difficult person to crack. That doesn’t mean we should do those things, however, and the fact that the debate has suddenly moved into “ends justify the means” territory should concern anyone who believes in the rule of law.

[sweetwater5s9]

 President George W. Bush put the correct policies in place, including Gitmo and increased intelligence gathering. Obama was wise to continue executing many of President Bush's strategies.

Just the facts.

[hoosier_daddy]

bush didn't give a shit where bin laden was....according to bush.  but i guess you're right...that chickenshit punk lied so much it's hard to know when he was telling the truth...here read this, if you can read, asshole...

[stretch351c]

Ho boy has no grasp on reality. He simply parrots whatever he is told to my his owners.