Posted on 09/28/2009 6:17:53 PM PDT by Kaslin
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" advisers whose policies are now increasingly recognized as having prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s, while claiming credit for ending it. The Great Depression ended only when World War II 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 New Deal" had been replaced by "Dr.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 are for 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 micromanage 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.
Such people have been told all their lives how brilliant they are, until finally they feel forced to admit it, with all due modesty. But they not only tend to overestimate their own brilliance, more fundamentally they tend to overestimate how important brilliance itself is when dealing with real world problems.
Many crucial things in life are learned from experience, rather than from clever thoughts or clever words. Indeed, a gift for the clever phrasing so much admired by the media can be a fatal talent, especially for someone chosen to lead a government.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
Great analysis. Intelligence is not the same as infailability. It is exactly the tendancy of those who are considered intelligent for too much fondness for their own ideas no matter how flawed that causes huge messes. Practical simple solutions are far too often disregarded for the sake of novelty.
- George Orwell
The biggest continuing fallacy is that these people are smart. Off the teleprompter, Obama sounds like a nitwit. He couldn’t hang in an aggressive conversation/argument at the local bar. Hillary Clinton? Are you kidding me? Much of what comes out of her mouth is pure mindless, whiney drivel, and she exhibits no particular talent whatsoever. People like Geithner? Hugely overmatched by his job. This bs about Ivy League people being ‘smart’ is absurd. They are poorly educated numb nuts who were/are naive enough to buy into leftist propaganda, while the common truck driver sniffs that crap out in about two minutes. Smart, my ass. This administration is really dumb, and without the constant cover provided by the media, most would acknowledge them to be the national joke that they are.
I believe he sounds very smart when he’s talking to “his people”, ie the leftists.
He only sounds like a nitwit talking to America because he’s being careful not to say anything that can be used against him ...
You kidding me? You didn’t hear him during his campaign speeches when he went off-script? It was embarrassing. You’ve bought into the bs.
I’ve always said that the smartest people make the stupidest mistakes!
Someday, I hope to stop doing that..
... a gift for the clever phrasing so much admired by the media can be a fatal talent, especially for someone chosen to lead a government.
I think "fatal" is an unfortunate choice of word in this context - some will take it literally.
"It was, after all, Franklin D. Roosevelt's brilliant "Brains Trust" advisers
whose policies are now increasingly recognized as having prolonged the
Great Depression of the 1930s, while claiming credit for ending it."
Similar cockiness as well.
No creative or original thought, no facility of language and not a whit of wit. The president is not brainy. The proof is off tele-prompter. He's simply learned well what he's been taught.
An Ivy League education is no guarantee of common sense or even actual intelligence. Someone with a great memory and a good work ethic can do very well in school. But when it comes to actual problem solving, specifically to problems that haven't been solved before, they can be complete failures in spite of all that education. Schools really don't teach problem solving for the most part. They teach tools that can be applied to the process.
A lesson that seems to be re-learned every generation...after the foul-up.
Mark Twain said, "Never let your schooling interfere with your education."
Or as a wise professor of mine once said, "In college you spend four years learning the rules, you spend the rest of your life learning the exceptions."
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