Obama: A Know Nothing

By Ben Stein on 4.6.12 @ 6:08AM

What else besides the Constitution does Mr. Obama not know?

Here, in outline form, is why the pronouncements from President Barack Obama, warning the Supreme Court to not overturn Obamacare. are so chilling:

1. The President supposedly went to Harvard Law School, graduated from same, was Law Review President of the Harvard Law Review at Harvard Law School. Then he supposedly taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Those are powerful law schools. Yet he obviously knows little of how the Constitution works if he thinks it would be rare or startling for the Supreme Court to overrule a law passed by Congress.

Judging whether or not a law is constitutional is precisely, exactly what the Supreme Court does. Passing on the constitutional muster of laws is their job. They do it often with federal laws and with state laws. The Supreme Court overruling legislatures is a commonplace.

If President Obama does not know this, it's a mark against Harvard and against the University of Chicago. Mostly, it is a serious mark against President Obama.

2. If he does not know how the government works under the Constitution, he should not be President.

3. If he does not know how the Constitution works even in its broadest strokes, what else does he not know?

He apparently thinks that it's his job to leave Western Europeans and Americans stripped of missile defense. He apparently thinks it's his job to unilaterally disarm America. That shows a yawning chasm in what he knows and what he does not know.

Another subject Mr. Obama thinks he knows about and doesn't is the oil companies. He hates them. He thinks they are subsidized by the workers in the cotton fields and then they exploit those workers. That is nonsense. Every business, every household, gets some deductions or credits for something. That's the way the tax code works. The taxpayers are not subsidizing "Big Oil" and "Big Oil" is now a lot smaller than it was twenty years ago. Now, the state players in the major oil producing states are the big boys. But why does Mr. Obama loathe the oil companies in the first place? They provide an essential product at a market price. They do not fix prices. The provide employment to millions and a comfortable way to travel to hundreds of millions. Why does Mr. Obama hate them? Because of a juvenile, City College of New York circa 1937 leftist view of the whole world. Sad. Disturbing. That is a highly anti-American worldview.

4. Is he really so arrogant that he thinks he can lecture and threaten the Court? This is his second attempt to bully and demean the Court. Is this from arrogance or from foolishness and arrogance? In either case, it is not good.

This man is getting to scare me. I personally am not terribly alarmed about Obamacare. I am terribly alarmed at a President who knows almost nothing about the Constitution. Meanwhile, who taught him Con Law? Time for some restraint. I actually find Mr. Obama likeable and upbeat most of the time. But in this case, he showed way too much of another side.

 

"The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president."

- Prager Zeitung, 28 April 2010