Obama and his Advisers Have a History Problem

It is always dangerous when our country's top political leader is a man with a profound lack of knowledge of history.  It is very difficult for a leader to exercise wise judgment when his judgment is not informed by knowledge of the past.  It is also helpful if a President knows such things as how Americans earn a living and basic American geography, such as how many states there are.

We have an usurping President, who would be King, who early on informed us that we have 57 states, seven of which only he in his unique universe knows anything about.  Given that the federal government provides for the defense of the states and is to prevent these states from interfering with interstate commerce, it is rather important that the President should be aware of how many states there are and as much about the people in them and how they make a living as possible.  It does not bode well when a presidential candidate thinks that the states are synonymous with the number of Heinz brands.  No, Mr. President, we did not admit states to the union until they just matched the number of brands that made John Kerry's wife a rich woman.  [The District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and five U.S. territories mean there are 50 states and 7 other territorial entities.  Apparently Obama had been told that 57 entities sent delegates to the Democratic National Convention and he needed to win the votes of enough of them to win the Democrat Party nomination.  Somewhere along the line, he probably became confused.]

We come to a dilemma.  When Obama claims to be a jobs-creating President, is he just ignorant of how many coal miners, railroad workers, port workers, and power plant workers he has put out of jobs and is about to put out of jobs with his insane anti-coal policies mostly implemented by his out-of-control EPA?  Is it the case that he has no concept of how many families he is throwing into poverty because he does not know what coal production means for families trying to earn a living in America?  Similarly for the impact of preventing the development of new oil and gas fields on federal lands and off-shore.  Is he wicked and evil or is he just incredibly ignorant?  I admit to going back and forth on this.

His comment this last week about the "Polish Death Camps" sways me once again in the direction of mind-boggling ignorance.  The death camps his teleprompter called Polish Death Camps were Polish only in that they were primarily on Polish soil for the purpose of killing Polish people.  The Poles were slaughtered by the Nazis who killed about 3 million Polish Jews and about 3 million Polish Catholics.  Poland was prime land for the expansion of the German people eastward under Hitler's leadership.  This was Hitler's long held dream.  While he hated the Jews, he had nothing but contempt for the Slavs who were in his way.  As a result of the Nazis and the Communists of the USSR, Poland was devastated and did not recover its pre-war population until the 1970s.  The Polish people did more than any other Eastern European nation to finally make the dominion of the USSR over Eastern Europe impossible.  Yet, Obama, apparently with help from his speech writers, callously called these Nazi death camps, Polish death camps.  The Poles were outraged and Obama refused to acknowledge himself that he should never have described the Nazi death camps as Polish death camps.

This ignorant man is not one who should be in charge of the defense and foreign policy of the United States of America.  This is especially the case since he combines this ignorance with a wrongheaded allegiance to socialism.  Perhaps the fact that the Poles have chosen to walk away from socialism is part of the reason he would not apologize to them.  Poland is one of the few European countries that has a reasonable growth rate.  It is a clear example of how much socialism cripples a country and it has created a very graphic picture of why Capitalism is superior to socialism.  This is not a picture that Obama wants Americans to examine.