2009-09-29 The Brainy Bunch
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The Brainy Bunch 2009/09/29 00:00
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- URL: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjVmMzc1MjVmYjdkNzcxNzExNTE4NzljMzBmZmMzNjI=
- Posted: 2009-09-29 (date: 2009/09/29)
- Topics: anti-intellectualism Barack Obama/criticism Barack Obama/Hitler
- Summary: «Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem. ... Make no mistake about it, Adolf Hitler was brilliant.»
- author: Thomas Sowell
- source: National Review
Excerpt
Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.
It was, after all, Franklin D. Roosevelt's brilliant "brains trust" whose policies are now increasingly recognized as having prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s, rather than ending it. The U.S. emerged from the Great Depression only when the Second World War put an end to many New Deal policies.
FDR himself said that "Dr. New Deal" had been replaced by "Dr. Win-the-War." But those today who support big spending like to credit wartime big spending for bringing the Great Depression to an end. They never ask the question as to why previous depressions had always ended on their own, much faster than the one under FDR, and without government intervention or massive government spending.
Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration – especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant "whiz kids" tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.
There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.
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Make no mistake about it, Adolf Hitler was brilliant. His underlying beliefs may have been half-baked and his hatreds overwhelming, but he was a political genius when it came to carrying out his plans based on those beliefs and hatreds.
Comments
A lovely piece of right-wing revisionist history. Aside from automatically losing the argument by invoking a comparison with Hitler without giving any justification, it's also not at all clear that Hitler was particularly smart. Politically effective, yes – but that's not the same thing.
Commentary:
- 2009-10-01 SOWELL'S STAND AGAINST INTELLIGENCE by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly