Thomas Sowell on the Incurious Obama

Here's a good read for y'all. It's from Thomas Sowell over at RCP called Obama's Dreams. It struck me because it points out the seemingly total and complete lack of intellectual curiosity of Barack Obama.

All fourteen of you have doubtless noticed that I prize certain personal traits very highly. Among these are intelligence, objectivity, and being grounded in Reality, traits that seems to be missing in many on the Left side of the political aisle. I've exhorted y'all (in the nicest way possible) to pause and ask yourself, "Is this true?" particularly when it comes to politics. This is important stuff because if we don't have politicians who will ask this crucial question, then, in my humble opinion, they aren't suited for office. They have a responsibility and a duty to Truth.

It's the question I would certainly ask if I was in a position of power.

Now that we have four years of experience with the radical, far-left, Marxist and Alinsky philosophies made into Progressive policy, we have some insight into how they think and view the world.

And they are lacking certain personality traits, intellectual curiosity being chief among them.

This is how you can spot the brainwashed. If someone keeps repeating phrases and buzzwords, and can't offer a substantive defense of them in conversation, then you're dealing with a person who just can't think for themselves. (As I've mentioned before, you don't need to "break" someone or reduce them to drooling idiocy in order to brainwash them. That's Hollywood fiction. It's frighteningly easy to do.)

Dr. Sowell dissects Obama thought processes, which he (Obama) handily documents in his two books.

After reading Barack Obama's book "Dreams from My Father," it became painfully clear that he has not been searching for the truth, because he assumed from an early age that he had already found the truth -- and now it was just a question of filling in the details and deciding how to change things.

Obama did not simply happen to encounter a lot of people on the far left fringe during his life. As he spells out in his book, he actively sought out such people. There is no hint of the slightest curiosity on his part about other visions of the world that might be weighed against the vision he had seized upon.

As Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School has pointed out, Obama made no effort to take part in the marketplace of ideas with other faculty members when he was teaching a law course there. What would be the point, if he already knew the truth and knew that they were wrong?

This would be a remarkable position to take, even for a learned scholar who had already spent decades canvassing a vast amount of information and views on many subjects. But Obama was already doctrinaire at a very early age -- and ill-informed or misinformed on both history and economics.

Do take time to read it all. It's a very enlightening article.