By Tom Kando
On August 18,
2011, Matt Patterson published a vicious
hit piece against President Obama in the Washington Post. It
continues to be widely circulated on the
Internet, often misleading the
readers that it’s the Washington Post which feels this way about Obama. In fact,
the paper only printed this in an
attempt to be fair to “the other side.”
Patterson’s thesis, based on what Norman Podhoretz had
written earlier, is that Obama is an incompetent nincompoop, our first
affirmative
action President, voted into office solely because of his race. The
claim is that Obama may be our worst President ever, and that his election was the result of
misguided liberal white guilt and mass hysteria
among the electorate.
Patterson not only claims that Obama is a disastrously
incompetent President, but that he also failed to achieve anything of value during his earlier academic and
political careers.
My purpose here is hardly to rebut Patterson’s absurd statement, but to playfully suggest a ranking of US Presidents:
As to the hit piece, just this: it is a furious rant, utterly lacking any facts or evidence, and often describing Obama in a manner precisely the opposite of reality: Patterson says that without a Teleprompter the President is speechless, can’t think clearly, is devoid of ideas, speaks in clichés, is narcissistic!
Is Patterson confusing Obama with George W. Bush, or what? Isn’t the opposite obvious - that Obama is a Spock-like man who possesses superior rationality, cool detachment and problem-solving capabilities?
Patterson and Podhoretz reiterate the oft-heard cliché that affirmative action is racist.
Best Fourteen
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1
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Franklin Roosevelt
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10
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2
|
Abraham Lincoln
|
10
|
|
3
|
James Madison
|
9
|
|
4
|
Thomas Jefferson
|
9
|
|
5
|
George Washington
|
9
|
|
6
|
Barack Obama
|
8
|
|
7
|
William Clinton
|
8
|
|
8
|
John Adams
|
8
|
|
9
|
James Monroe
|
8
|
|
10
|
Theodore Roosevelt
|
8
|
|
11
|
Harry Truman
|
8
|
|
12
|
John Q. Adams
|
7
|
|
13
|
Dwight Eisenhower
|
7
|
|
14
|
Woodrow Wilson
|
7
|
|
Middle Ten
|
15
|
Andrew Jackson
|
6
|
16
|
John Kennedy
|
6
|
|
17
|
George Walker Bush
|
6
|
|
18
|
Lyndon Johnson
|
6
|
|
19
|
Ronald Reagan
|
6
|
|
20
|
John Tyler
|
5
|
|
21
|
Grover Cleveland
|
5
|
|
22
|
James Carter
|
4
|
|
23
|
Richard Nixon
|
4
|
|
24
|
Gerald Ford
|
4
|
|
Worst Ten
|
25
|
Ulysses Grant
|
3
|
26
|
James Garfield
|
3
|
|
27
|
Calvin Coolidge
|
3
|
|
28
|
Zachary Taylor
|
2
|
|
29
|
Andrew Johnson
|
2
|
|
30
|
Herbert Hoover
|
2
|
|
31
|
Warren Harding
|
1
|
|
32
|
James Buchanan
|
1
|
|
33
|
George W. Bush
|
1
|
|
34
|
William Harrison
|
0
|
|
Don’t know(Nine)
|
35
|
Martin Van Buren
|
|
36
|
James Polk
|
||
37
|
Millard Fillmore
|
||
38
|
Franklin Pierce
|
||
39
|
Rutherford Hayes
|
||
40
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Chester Arthur
|
||
41
|
Benjamin Harrison
|
||
42
|
William McKinley
|
||
43
|
William Taft
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