That Barack Obama is weak on geography, history and vocabulary is arguably more “amusing”, as USA Today puts it, than problematic. After all, Dan Quayle, now the exemplar of political malapropism, was picked for Vice President because he had been an extraordinarily effective and influential Senator (something that one can’t say about all young Senators who run for higher office). He would probably have been a competent President, even if he greeted some Latin American counterpart with a hearty “Ego te saluto!”.
It’s harder to take an optimistic view, though, of a President who says things like this:
The reason the unemployment rate is still as high as it is, in part, is because there have been huge layoffs of government workers at the federal level, at the state level, at the local level. Teachers, police officers, firefighters, social workers – they have really taken it in the chin over the last several months. And so, what we’re trying to do is to see if we can stabilize the budget.
Now, the President did speak sans teleprompter, so one couldn’t blame him for slight inaccuracies. But the man with the most influence on our country’s economic policies ought not to have his facts completely upside-down. Jim Geraghty lays out the numbers. The bottom line is that total federal, state and local government employment in April 2011 was almost as high (seasonally adjusted) as in June 2007, at the peak of the last economic expansion: 22,218,000 in 2007 vs. 22,166,000 now. The raw 2011 number (without seasonal adjustment) is about 400,000 higher: 22,176,000 in 2007, 22,594,000 today.
Some “huge layoffs”!
Meanwhile, private sector employment declined by about 8 million during the same period.
Then there was the Presidential assertion that the fence along the Mexican border (a waste of money, IMHO, but that’s not today’s topic) “is now basically complete”. Maybe there’s some Obamian/Pickwickian sense in which that’s a true statement, but –
There are now 350 miles of pedestrian fencing along the Mexican border. The border is 1,954 miles long. That’s 18 percent. And only one-tenth of that 18 percent is the double and triple fencing that has proved so remarkably effective in, for example, the Yuma sector. Another 299 miles – 15 percent – are vehicle barriers that pedestrians can walk rightthrough. . . .
The GAO reported in February that less than half the border is under “operational control” of the government. Which undermines the entire premise of Obama’s charge that, because the border is effectively secure, “Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement” didn’t really mean it.
Maybe the President is so cynical that he expects his whoppers to pass without scrutiny, but the simpler, not to mention more civil, hypothesis is that he believed what he was saying. Why his reality is so different from ours, I have no idea, but the phenomenon is unsettling.
What if, for instance, the decision to raid Osama bin-Laden’s compound was based on “facts” as imaginary as the huge government layoffs and finished border fence? There’s a sliver of evidence for that idea: Anonymous, but clearly pro-Obama, sources assert that the President increased the size of the force so that it would “be large enough to fight its way out of Pakistan if confronted by hostile local police officers and troops” – from about 25 SEAL’s to about 50!
The SEAL’s are among the best fighting men in history, but they don’t hail from Krypton. Did the President really think that a commando of 50 men in four helicopters could “fight its way” through a hundred mile gantlet back to the Afghanistan border? Is he unaware that Pakistan has an air force and that helicopters dogfight poorly against jets?
This story is so bizarre that, pace the commenters at the links above, it almost has to be true, at least in the sense of reflecting the President’s own ideas about military matters. If so – well, Napoleon said that luck is more useful than talent, and we may hope that he was right.
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