Obama is nothing but a bullshitter by Dan Calabrese

In acommentary in theWall Street Journal, Dr. Scott Gottlieb – a practicing internistand currently a fellow at theAmerican Enterprise Institute– demonstrated convincinglythat President Obama simply doesn’t know very much about the practice of medicine.

There is a name for a person with a talent like this: He is a bullshitter. The truth is that he doesn’t have the slightest idea, but he’s very smooth in his use of the language and his tone of voice, so he convinces you he’s on solid ground when he really isn’t. He knows all the tricks and he does it convincingly. And most impressively of all, he blatantly makes things up, and says them with such conviction, you can’t imagine they’re not true.

This is what Obama does all the time. He waxes on about the economy, and about the decisive action that must be taken to address it. But if you actually consider carefully the statements he makes about the economy, you’ll start to figure out thathe doesn't really understand economics at all.

Obama went to theMiddle Eastand made a series of speeches about strategic issues, about theIsraeli-Palestinian conflictand about the wars inIraqandAfghanistan. They sounded smooth, but for the careful listener, they betrayed a shocking lack of knowledge about the subjects he was addressing.

We elected a president who has never worked in the private sector, who has never functioned as an executive at any level, and whose very brief work in theU.S. Senateconsisted of no significant accomplishments. He has spent his entire life spouting inanities with great eloquence, but he has learned very little about how the real world works.

And yet he was elected president, in part, because people were convinced he was brilliant, and they were tired of the “dumb”George W. Bush, who had not only run a large state for six years, but had also run several businesses and earned a master’s degree in business fromHarvard.

Turns outBarack Obamadoesn’t really know very much about anything, a fact that is troubling enough by itself. But when you combine it with his apparent conviction that he should be put in charge of regulating all these things he knows nothing about, and then you add in his talent as a first-rate bullshitter – you end up with the most ignorant guy in the room making the decisions for the rest of us.

I call it bullshit.