Compare and Contrast.

An AP US History Professor contrasts the media seizure of the gnat  of Bachman's historical illiteracy with the camel of Obama's:

Now it would have been nice if Stephanopoulos or any journalist had shown as much focus on historical gaffes that Obama has made. Here are a few reminders.


During the 2008 campaign he'd claimed that we should meet face-to-face with those we oppose just as Kennedy had met with Khrushchev when "We were on the brink of nuclear war." Except Kennedy's meeting with Khrushchev had occurred more than a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis and was regarded even by JFK as a failure. In fact, Khrushchev concluded from his meeting with JFK at Vienna that the young president would not be a barrier to an increased Soviet hardline as he went on to approve the building of the Berlin Wall and the placement of missiles in Cuba.

Also during the campaign he bragged about his uncle being part of the liberation of Auschwitz when it was the Soviets who liberated the camps in Poland. His uncle helped to liberate a satellite camp of Buchenwald. I would have thought that, if he were truly so proud of his uncle's service, he might have read up on those experiences and learned more about what actually happened.

At his inaugural, he didn't know how many men had been president double-counting Cleveland. That was a small error, of course, but you'd think that for an Inaugural Address he or his speechwriters would get it right.

Obama's aides seem so impressed with the boss that they have lost all historical perspective. Remember Rahm Emanuel telling Obama that he had faced the toughest times that any president has ever faced. Apparently, Obama and his aides only remember Abraham Lincoln when they want to reach for some strained comparison between the two.

Obama's sense of himself seems so grandiose that he can make boneheaded comments like claiming that the reason he was so unpopular in Texas is that "Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, for, you know, historic reasons." Apparently, this man who supposedly learned so much from the civil rights movement was unaware that the Democrats were the party of the solid South and that Texas had been a Democratic state since its admission in 1845 until Nixon's election in 1972. That was the historic gaffe that led Scott Johnson of Powerline to say that "Obama's historical ignorance could be a full time beat for somebody who does this work for a living".

It is a fair point, though, that it would be really nice if our elected officials would do some reading on History.