Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

There is a type of idiocy so profound, and so profoundly anti-reality that you need to go to school for several years, at a cost of millions before you actually internalize it and believe it with all your heart.

A lot of this kind of crazy stupidity is epitomized by the left in the country and by our former president. People often referred to president Obama as believing all the sorts of things that college freshmen discuss late into the night as though they were great mysteries of the world when they are fairly obvious irrelevancies. They weren’t wrong. And that kind of learned ignorance, of purposeful perplexity, can be incredibly dangerous in a head of state, as we’re finding out with the Iran deal.

So how could a grown man, who had studied—presumably—history believe that it was a good idea to give lots of money to Iran to… build nuclear facilities? What kind of baby unborn would buy that the regime which has declared itself at war with us for forty years, and which calls us things like Great Satan, and which keeps their own people in abject subjection would use that money for good and realize we were really good guys?

You have to go down the list of facts the left believes that just aren’t so.

When Obama took power, he talked about being an anti-Reagan and how everything that Reagan had done was wrong and had sent the country down a wrong path.

He did manage to be the anti-Reagan, making us a mockery abroad, and ruining the economy. But that’s not what he was trying to do.

He was trying to be the second term of Jimmy Carter. Okay, granted he managed that too, but not the way he meant to do it. He meant to be the second term of Jimmy Carter as the left had been making it up since Jimmy left the White House. “If only he’d had another term, he’d have managed total peace in the world, by not being aggressive at all.” “If he had stayed in power, you’d see that his policies were responsible for the prosperity under Reagan.” “If he’d stayed in power, we’d have green energy and live off unicorn farts.” Okay, I might have made up the part about unicorn farts, but it’s only a minor exaggeration.

Mister Obama was told this from earliest childhood, by the leftists surrounding him. People he respected, and who presented themselves as learned and intelligent told him these things. To not believe them would be to doubt the foundations of the world.

Other things he obviously believed, vid the apology tour: America was the big bully in the world, and if only America were made small and unimportant, other countries would grow and be prosperous, proportionally. And also, every culture is alike, except ours which is uniquely bad.

Given this indoctrination, dinned into his brain from earliest consciousness, how could he do but what he did: picking up Jimmy Carter’s appeasement abroad and impairment of the economy abroad in the absolute belief that it would net prosperity and peace?

Anyone else, whose view of the real world wasn’t obscured by propaganda from the time he/she acquired language, knows that speaking soft to bullies and those who hate you is a good way to get killed, and that America for all its faults has maintained relative peace in the world, compared to was here before the Pax Americana. Oh, also any idiot who reads about women stoned to death because they were raped, or gay people dropped from roofs, or even a country so screwed up that drug gangs are the true government, knows this is nothing like our own culture, where microaggressions are an actual concern.

But people who’ve been indoctrinated and told all smart people believe counterfactuals can’t see the reality.

Hence the Iran deal, and what was for a while a moribund economy, and what came really close to making Russia think it could take us.

Look, guys, we got off lightly. For a while there, I fully expected us to lose a city or two.

But just remember that Obama is not an oddity. There are many many people around who aren’t’ so much ignorant, as they know so many things that just ain’t so.

What they think they know can kill us. Simple law of averages, a few of them will get into power. (a few of them are in power, elected or not.)

Which is why we can’t rest, we can’t relax, and it’s no time to assume everything is already lost and therefore we can do nothing.

It’s time to fight. It’s time to work. It’s time to keep the pressure on.

This is no time to go wobbly.

 

Rerpinted with permission from According to Hoyt for May 2, 2018