I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is.... He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never been challenged intellectually.... He's been bored to death his whole life. He's just too talented to do what ordinary people do.So how does a man of such extraordinary intellectual abilities choose to spend his time when he's not golfing?
I have to say this is disconcerting. He's the leader of the free world, for heaven's sake. He wanted this job, it's going to make him very rich some day (perhaps as a commentator on ESPN), and he has a responsibility to all of us to devote himself to it. If he'd rather watch sports talk shows then he should quit the Oval Office and let Joe Biden take over.
Well, maybe not that, but look, I don't begrudge the Vacationer-in-Chief some down time, but I do get a little perplexed when I hear pundits praise Mr. Obama's genius. I mean, maybe brilliant men do spend time watching sports and shows about sports, but somehow I can't see someone whose intellect is alleged to be imported directly from Mt. Olympus spending hours every day watching ESPN.
Why doesn't the media ever ask him what books he reads, as they did both George Bush and Sarah Palin, or what movies he watches, or who his favorite writers are? Why don't they ask him, as they always do Republicans, his views on evolution, or the significance of Antietam, or the work of James Madison?
I wonder if they never ask because they're afraid they know the response they'll get from the man who only learned after he became a candidate for the nation's highest office that there are 50, not somewhere between 57 and 60, states and that military medics are not "corpse" men.
This is not meant to be a criticism of Mr. Obama, though it may sound that way. A lot of good, ordinary people enjoy sports and don't know some basic facts about the country. It's rather a criticism of a media which consistently misled the American people about Mr. Obama's qualifications for high office and which set such high expectations (A Nobel Peace Prize in his first few months in office!?) for his presidency that it was inevitable that he'd fail to live up to them.
Soon we're going to start hearing the same sort of glowing encomiums to the genius of Hillary Clinton. Hopefully, voters will be less gullible this time around.