Political Irony

If you look over the evidence, you do have to wonder how he got into all those Ivy League schools:

The dean looked over Barack’s transcript and college boards and then suggested in a kindly way that he apply to some less competitive colleges in addition to Columbia.

There were no class rankings at his high school, but Barack never made honor roll even one term, unlike 110 boys in his class.

His SAT scores were 566 for the verbal part and 640 for math. Those were far below the median scores for students admitted to his class at Columbia: 668 verbal and 718 math.

At Columbia, Barack Obama distinguished himself primarily as a hard partier, and he managed to be detained by police twice during his university years: once for stealing a Christmas wreath as a fraternity prank and once for trying to tear down the goalposts during a football game at Princeton.

Obama’s transcript at Columbia shows that he was a solid C student. Although a history major, he sampled widely in the social sciences and did poorly in political science and economics while achieving some of his best grades (the equivalent of a B+) in philosophy and anthropology. The transcript indicates that in Obama’s freshman year, the only year for which rankings were available, he was in the twenty-first percentile of his class—meaning that four-fifths of the students were above him. Yet at the same time that he was earning Cs at Columbia, Obama displayed a formidable intelligence in another way. At his induction into the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity, he and others were asked to name all fifty-four pledges in the room. Most were were able to name only five or six. When it was Obama’s turn, he named every single one. Later he rose to become president of DKE, and he was also tapped into Skull and Bones, an elite secret society to which his father had also belonged.

And then he somehow got into Harvard for graduate school.

Oops, wait a minute, there’s been a mistake. Please replace “high school” with “Andover”, replace “Columbia” with “Yale”, and replace “Barack Obama” with “George W. Bush”.

Now I think we do know how he got into those Ivy League schools.

[Huge hat tip to PresidentProfiles.com for the original biographical material, and to Dayriffer.com for pointing out the hypocrisy of people (cough, Trump, Tea Party) who question Obama’s education.]

© Mike Luckovich

See this.

In 1946 the article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” was published, laying out the policy of containment that proposed that the best way to defeat the Soviet Union was not to attack it, but to contain it. If the US was able to merely counteract Soviet influence, then the internal problems of their communist system would inevitably lead to its collapse.

The article had a profound impact on American foreign policy, and it worked.

When it was published, the article was simply signed X, but the author turned out to be the American diplomat George Kennan. Now a new article has been published, but this time signed Y. The new article points out that the policy of containment — with its massive military build-up and quasi-imperial policy aimed at countering Soviet influence — is still in place even though it is no longer needed and is actually hurting us. The fact that we spend more on defense than all the other countries in the world put together might have made some sense when we were facing down the Soviet empire, but is now pointless and is bankrupting us.

When we have so much military power, we tend to favor military solutions instead of political solutions. Which is why we have gotten bogged down in multiple wars and vastly overreacted to Islamic terrorism. And we have fallen into the oldest trap in the world:

Washington needs to make sure that the United States does not fall into the imperial trap of every other superpower in history, spending greater and greater time and money and energy stabilizing disorderly parts of the world on the periphery, while at the core its own industrial and economic might is waning.

Instead of running up our national debt on pointless wars, the article says that we need to be investing in the real sources of national power: our youth, infrastructure, and economy. Instead of seeing the rest of the world as threats to be fought, we need to fight hard to promote American competitiveness, influence, and innovation. Above all else, we need to spend more money on education and invest in our children in order to ensure our future.

By investing energy, talent, and dollars now in the education and training of young Americans — the scientists, statesmen, industrialists, farmers, inventors, educators, clergy, artists, service members, and parents, of tomorrow — we are truly investing in our ability to successfully compete in, and influence, the strategic environment of the future. Our first investment priority, then, is intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health and social services to provide for the continuing development and growth of America’s youth.

But what is really ironic about this article is that it was not written by some bleeding heart socialist, it was written by two senior members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That’s right, two of our top military strategists say that we need to stop throwing so much money at the military and instead spend more money on our people.

I am shocked and awed.

When a corporation cheats each of their customers out of a small amount of money, it generally isn’t worth it for an individual to sue them. Consider the California couple who objected to a questionable $30 charge on their cellphone bill.

This problem is exactly why class-action lawsuits were invented. By banding together, disgruntled consumers can make the stakes high enough to warrant legal action against misbehaving corporations. Instead of suing for their puny $30, if a million consumers were overcharged they can join forces in a single $30 million lawsuit.

But the Supreme Court has declared once again that Corporations are more equal than real people. By a 5-4 decision (with all five Republican appointees siding with corporate power and four Democratic appointees against), the court ruled that it is legal for corporations to include language in their user agreements that prohibits class-action suits and forces customers to face off individually against teams of corporate lawyers.

Your only other alternative is to not buy products from companies that include such language in their user agreements. Of course, good luck finding such a company now.