Many years ago, I was a member of a committee that was recommending to whom grant money should be awarded. Since I knew one of the applicants, I asked if this meant that I should recuse myself from voting on his application.
“No,” the chairman said. “I know him too — and he is one of the truly great phonies of our time.”
The man was indeed a very talented phony. He could convince almost anybody of almost anything — provided that person wasn't already knowledgeable about the subject.
Incidentally, he did not get the grant he applied for.
This episode came back to me recently as I read an incisive column by Charles Krauthammer, citing some of the many gaffes in public statements made by President Obama.
One presidential gaffe gives the flavor, and suggests the reason, for many others. It involved the Falkland Islands.
With Argentina today beset by domestic problems, demanding the return of the Falklands is a way for Argentina's government to distract the Argentine public's attention from the country's economic and other woes.
Because the Argentines call these islands “the Malvinas” rather than “the Falklands,” Obama decided to use the Argentine term. But he referred to them as “the Maldives.”
It so happens that the Maldives are thousands of miles away from the Malvinas. The former are in the Indian Ocean, while the latter are in the South Atlantic.
Nor is this the only gross misstatement that Obama has gotten away with, thanks to the mainstream media.
Another presidential gaffe was Obama's reference to a military corps as a military “corpse.” He obviously is a man who is used to sounding off about things he has paid little or no attention to in the past. His mispronunciation of a common military term was especially revealing to someone who was once in the Marine Corps, not Marine “corpse.”
Like other truly talented phonies, Obama concentrates his skills on the effect of his words on other people — most of whom do not have the time to become knowledgeable about the things he is talking about. Whether what he says bears any relationship to the facts is politically irrelevant.
Back during Obama's first year in office, he kept repeating, with great apparent earnestness, that there were “shovel-ready” projects that would quickly provide many much-needed jobs, if only his spending plans were approved by Congress.
He seemed very convincing — if you didn't know how long it can take for any construction project to get started, after going through a bureaucratic maze of environmental impact studies, zoning commission rulings and other procedures that can delay even the smallest and simplest project for years.
Only about a year or so after his big spending programs were approved by Congress, Obama himself laughed at how slowly everything was going on his supposedly “shovel-ready” projects.
One wonders how he will laugh when all his golden promises about ObamaCare turn out to be false and a medical disaster. Or when his foreign policy fiascoes in the Middle East are climaxed by a nuclear Iran.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
