Smarty Pants

Just how the heck, I ask myself on nearly a daily basis, did Barack Obama ever acquire his vaunted reputation as an exceptionally smart person? How did his vacuous gas-baggery, from his ward-heeler days to the present, ever convince anyone that he is an intellectual heavyweight deserving of praise for his clever "rhetoric"? Beats the heck out of me. I have seen bloody little evidence of it. He is virtually a complete economic illiterate, entirely unfamiliar with the nuances of technology, a clueless parroter of fatuous climate change puffery regarding all energy issues, incapable of mathematical rigor regarding any issue, significantly divorced from reality regarding the nature of the country's enemies--and its friends, uncritically not to mention smugly enamored of a farrago of redistributionist malarkies, a depressing ignoramus regarding the issues, technical and economic, confronted by the automotive industry, and so direly lacking in extemporaneous off-the-prompter speaking skills as to render such as Sarah Palin positively Churchillian by comparison.

Now all that drivel scrolling down the angled prompter screen could perhaps be laid at the feet of his speechwriters but all that would do is imply that he is too dumb to be that stupid. His addresses and "speeches" contain nothing ringing, nothing as clever as a Whoopi Goldberg throw-away crack, nothing remotely specific or un-triangulated, and betray an ignorance of the problems of that perennial darling of Progressives, the working man, so profound as to make Bonny Prince Charlie seem like Larry the Cable Guy.

Too harsh? Consider a recent statement in which he averred that if one has a vehicle getting eight miles per gallon then perhaps it is time for a trade-in. The most charitable comment possible on this statement is "easy for him to say". The least charitable comment would require so many euphemistic asterisks as to render it unintelligible. Where o where is the "smart" in all of this? Is it that he has a media neutral accent that in no way sounds southern? What bilge. Is it that his speaking voice has a certain facilely sonorous quality? What what? Are we supposed to be mesmerized by the allegedly comforting sound of his voice and ignore the content and implications of his words? Is it that he graduated from Hahvahd and ipso facto is therefore undeniably smart? Remind me again, from where was it that the reviled dunce George Bush graduated?

I suspect that the simplest explanation is that to much of the (insert obligatory sneer here) main stream media Progressives are much more to their innate political likings therefore that automatically makes them "smart" whereas anyone even a nanometer more conservative than Joe Lieberman must perforce be assumed to be less smart, a lot less. Only two words and an initial are needed to decisively prove this assumption as meritless as a fevered Birther rant--William F. Buckley.