The Village Idiot Has Been Found

“MONUMENTAL DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR”

by Paul R. Hollrah, ©2012

(Apr. 14, 2012) — If the village of Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya is the ancestral home of Barack Obama, then we are justified in announcing that villagers can no longer claim to have misplaced their idiot. He is alive and well and is living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.

Although Obama claims to have attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years, Columbia University in New York for two years, and Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA for three years, we have yet to see proof of any of that. We are told that he became president of the Harvard Law Review in his second year of law school and that he graduated magna cum laude in 1991. Again, we have no proof of any of that… no documentation, no proof of legal scholarship, no published articles, no grades, nothing. All we have is the word of a man who claims to have campaigned in 57 states and who doesn’t know the difference between a medical corpsman and a medical corpse-man.

With little written material to go on, the best evidence we have of Obama’s inability to express himself through the written word can be found in an August 2011 article by literary expert Jack Cashill titled, “Early Obama Letter Confirms Inability to Write.”

Cashill tells us that, on November 16, 1990, Obama published a letter in the Harvard Law Record, an independent law school newspaper, responding to a letter from a student named Jim Chen in which Chen criticized the Law Review’s affirmative action policies. Chen argued that affirmative action stigmatizes its presumed beneficiaries.

As Cashill describes the Obama response, it was “… classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged.” Cashill points out that, in Obama’s very first sentence, he opens with what is quite common in his writing… his inability to make subject and predicate agree. Obama wrote: “Since the merits of the Law Review’s selection policy has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues… ”

Cashill remarks that, “If Obama were as smart as a fifth-grader, he would know that ‘merits… have.’ ” As it was, Obama’s sentence construction was just one step up from the ebonic version: “Since the merits of the Law Review’s selection policy be the subject of…”

Although the Obama letter was fewer than a thousand words long, Obama repeated the subject-predicate error at least two more times. Cashill points out that in one sentence he couldn’t make up his mind which verb option was correct, so he tried both. He wrote: “Approximately half of this first batch is chosen … the other half are selected …”

If these are indicative of Obama’s writing skills, then we can understand his need to keep all of his college and university writings hidden from public view. How does a man graduate magna cum laude from Harvard Law School when he couldn’t possibly earn a passing grade in English Composition at the North Cupcake Community College in North Cupcake, Indiana? Knowing that Obama and Bill O’Reilly are both Harvard graduates does little to support the school’s lofty reputation.

However, Obama’s extemporaneous speaking skills are apparently no better. Let us not forget what happens when he is speaking without a teleprompter and the electronic device at the other end of his earpiece fails to put the necessary words into his mouth. In one such instance he said, “What they’ll say is, ‘Well, it costs too much money,’ but you know what? It would cost, about. It… it… it would cost about the same as what we would spend. It. Over the course of 10 years it would cost what it would costs us (nervous laughter). All right. Okay. We’re going to. It… It would cost us about the same as it would cost for about… hold on one second. I can’t hear myself. But I’m glad you’re fired up, though. I’m glad.”

But it’s one thing for him to embarrass himself in front of a friendly crowd of Kool-Ade drinkers (i.e., the White House press corps). It is another thing entirely to embarrass himself… and the entire nation… in front of visiting heads of state and the international press corps.

In a recent Rose Garden press conference, Obama stood between Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon. We were all profoundly embarrassed when Obama used that forum to show disrespect for the U.S. Supreme Court. In response to a question about the Supreme Court deliberations on his Obamacare boondoggle, he said, “I am confident the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically-elected Congress.

“I just remind conservative commentators that for years we have heard the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. That an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example and I am pretty confident that this Court will recognize that and not take that step.”

Not only does Obama display a monumental ignorance of the genius of the system of checks and balances provided by our three co-equal branches of government, but he displays a frightening level of ignorance of what constitutes judicial activism. As a dedicated Marxist he prefers to ignore the fact that almost every instance of judicial activism in modern times has occurred when liberal justices have strained to find previously undiscovered rights within the Constitution.

Nor does he appear to understand that the most glaring example of judicial restraint in recent memory has been the refusal of conservatives on the Roberts court to hear evidence of his own failure to meet the “natural born Citizen” standard of the United States Constitution.

However, the flap over Obama’s ignorance of constitutional principles was not all bad in that it produced at least one living human being who actually knew Obama before he became President of the United States. Most Americans are understandably curious about this man who came out of nowhere to occupy the world’s most powerful office. Who were his friends as a boy and as a young man? Did he have girlfriends? Who were his college classmates and his roommates? When he lectured at the University of Chicago Law School, who were his students?

Now, in the wake of his humiliating Rose Garden tirade, it appears that we have a partial answer to one of these questions. A former University of Chicago law student, Thom Lambert, now a University of Missouri law professor, has come forward to say that he studied constitutional law under Obama at the University of Chicago. But Lambert’s comments are not the unqualified endorsement that Obama would want to hear. Lambert said, “Of course, even a (constitutional law) professor focusing on the Bill of Rights should know that the principle of judicial review has been alive and well since 1803, so I still feel like my educational credentials have been tarnished a bit by the President’s ‘unprecedented, extraordinary’ remarks.”

Obama should be profoundly embarrassed to know that the only person ever to come forward to confess a previous teacher-student relationship with him is embarrassed by the relationship.

As the 44th President of the United States, Obama has clearly stolen the title “worst president in American history” from the previous title holder: Democrat Jimmy Carter. So it is not surprising to find that a Newsmax blogger, John L. Perry, has gone far out on a limb to suggest that a military coup may be preferable to a second term for Obama.

In a September 30, 2009 article titled, “Obama Risks a Domestic Military Intervention,” Perry wrote, “What happens if the generals Obama sent to win the Afghan war are told by the president (who now says, ‘I’m not interested in victory’) that they will be denied troops they must have to win? Do they follow orders they cannot carry out, consistent with their oath of duty? Do they resign en masse? Or do they soldier on, hoping the 2010 congressional elections will reverse the situation? Do they dare gamble the national survival on such political whims…?”

But talk of a military coup against a sitting president… even one known to be occupying the office illegally… is dangerous talk. We are a nation of laws, not a “banana republic.”

A far more practical solution is proposed in an April 7, 2012 article by Commander Charles Kerchner (USN, Ret.). Commander Kerchner reminds us that all military officers are required to swear the following oath upon receiving their commissions: “I (name), having been appointed a (rank) in the United States (branch of service), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the office upon which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

What Commander Kerchner suggests is that the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff approach the leaders of the Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, with the demand that they conduct a comprehensive bipartisan investigation into numerous charges lodged against Barack Obama. The allegation would include, but are not limited to, charges that he is not a “natural born” U.S. citizen, that the long form birth certificate and draft registration card he has produced as evidence of his eligibility are poorly constructed forgeries, and that the Social Security number he currently uses was originally issued to an unknown resident of Connecticut.

As David Brooks of The New York Times has recently written, “President Barack Obama is an intelligent, judicious man who can see all sides of an issue. But every once in a while he tries to get politically cute, and he puts on his Keith Olbermann mask.”

No, Mr. Brooks, Barack Obama is none of those things. He is certainly not intelligent, he is not judicious, and he does not see all sides of an issue. And while he may at times appear to be a political “clown,” he is just another in a long line of wannabe dictators possessed of just one principal talent… that of a glib tongue animated by monumental delusions of grandeur. Men such as Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chavez come to mind.

phollrah@yahoo.com