I can’t help but laugh when the person with the least foreign policy experience in this entire race criticizes Obama’s ability to keep this nation safe. 

“He wants to soften the focus in these closing days, hoping your mind won’t wander to the real challenges of national security that he is incapable of meeting.”

Surely Sarah Palin is intelligent and informed enough to know that Barack Obama has already begun to meet these challenges. In 2006 he introduced legislation to expand the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program,  the purpose of which is to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction in former Soviet Union states.  Along those same lines in 2007 he authored a provision that demanded the President lay out a plan to “ensure that all nuclear weapons and weapons-usable material at vulnerable sites around the world are secure by 2012 against the threats that terrorists have shown they can pose.” 

Barack Obama knows that the greatest threat to our nation a loose nuclear weapon falling into terrorist hands, so in his few short years in the Senate he has worked to stop that from happening, and I’m sure he will continue that effort as President.

In addition to ending the threat of existing nuclear weapons, Obama will work to stop the creation of new ones by states like Iran or North Korea.  With diplomacy, like the kind that is already having positive effects in North Korea, we can stop terrorist sponsoring nations like Iran from building nuclear weapons that could threaten our national security.  McCain/Palin would rather continue the Bush plan of ignoring nations unless they meet all of our demands first, the kind of plan that has allowed Iran to continue on its path towards nuclear weapons. Obama will stop these nations before they become a threat.

It is for these reasons I am confident that Barack Obama’s wise leadership will keep us safe now, and in the future, despite what the highly intelligent governor from Alaska might think.

This Ted speaker explains where the big bang comes from. For me, it’s literally impossible to hear these explanations and not think of the Christians explanations given for our existence. They are both fantasies.

Earlier today I got into a discussion with several people who seem convinced that Palin is unintelligent. The basis of this argument relied mostly on the fact that Palin did a poor job answering several questions posed to her by some biased reporters. Apparently, according to this argument, unintelligent is defined as an inability to articulate well.

Given the definition of intelligence being used to characterize Palin, one would be forced to conclude that Obama is unintelligent as well.

Some might be tempted to revise their definition of unintelligence to get around the problem of a momentary poor articulation. They might argue that Palin has proven herself to be unintelligent because she is unable to answer a question.

We see here Obama falling all over himself attempting to answer a simple question. Defining intelligence as an inability to answer questions clearly would force you to conclude that Obama lacks intelligence in the same way that Palin does.

Some have argued that Palin is unintelligent because she was using rhetoric to criticize earmarks that went towards experiments using fruit flys. She was ignorant in how this kind of research can lead to discoveries that might help alleviate or eliminate down syndrome. Lacking the knowledge of how this supposed basic science operates, so the argument goes, indicates she is unintelligent.

I would argue that more fundamental then knowing the role of fruit fly research to clinical research, is knowing how many states are in the Union. Here we clearly see that such basic knowledge is elusive for Obama. If the argument goes that not knowing basic facts makes you unintelligent then Obama is even less intelligent than Palin.

By the way Biden is unintelligent like Palin and Obama.

This clip of Obama is just painful. About halfway through things fall apart and he really struggles to articulate something coherent. Its nice because it shows how even Obama struggles with responding to someone that is antagonistic towards him in the way Couric and Gibson were towards Palin.

This clip is also nice because it shows just how important editing can be for making a candidate look articulate. Among the stuttering and poor sentence formulation Obama gave some smart answers particularly on the back end. An editor could easily excise most of the stuttering and that would give the viewer the impression that Obama gave a much more articulate response then he actually did. Alternatively, an editor from the Daily Show could easily excise the articulate portions making Obama look like a bumbling idiot. This is why selective editing, made popular by Michael Moore, is utterly useless in providing actual information about a candidate. Its also why I criticize using anything from the show as being useful for actual information.

Do I think Obama is unintelligent? Taking into consideration the clips in this post and embracing the ways in which many of readers have argued shows Palin to be unintelligent, I would be forced to concede that Obama is just as unintelligent as Palin. However, I think only a fool would seriously feel comfortable judging Obama’s intelligence based solely on a few clips in which he speaks inarticulate. The only question I have is why are so many of my readers foolishly judging Palin’s intelligence on a couple of clips?

One more thing I want to mention. This silly nit picking, where one politician made this gaffe and another politician made another gaffe is thoroughly uninteresting to me. Putting this post together was literally work. I’m not stupid, I realize that human beings sometimes say things poorly, god knows I do it every day. Perfection is not an attribute any human can claim. And yet partisans love to point to these slips as if they indicate something important. The fact of the matter is they don’t. Bush, McCain, Palin, Biden, Obama are all intelligent enough to run as the chief executive of the country, even if their detractors are successful in framing their gaffes as something more meaningful then they actually are.

Now that is has been established that all candidates, by my readers definition, are unintelligent lets have talk about policy. You know the part of politics that’s interesting.

Tigherhawk make this observation about who should be in charge of assisting family members:

This story is eerily reminiscent of the moment back in December 2007 when Obama seemed to brag that his grandmother lived in a “hut” back in Kenya. The press ate it up, but he dropped that talking point after conservative bloggers wondered why he had not helped the poor woman pay for a better house. Call me a bonehead, but we are beginning to see a pattern here. Indeed, I have finally figured out why somebody who has been as successful as Barack Obama believes that the government must help people who cannot or do not help themselves: He simply does not understand that helping the poor, unlucky, or incompetent is first the responsibility of family.

Via Instapundit, The Register reports:

Snow fell as the House of Commons debated Global Warming yesterday - the first October fall in the metropolis since 1922. The Mother of Parliaments was discussing the Mother of All Bills for the last time, in a marathon six hour session.

When will we heed the warning signs of the impending global cooling. All this foolish talk about global warming when the real threat is cooling is getting us nowhere. We need to implement policies that require maximizing the amount of carbon put into the atmosphere. Only through the greenhouse effect will be able to survive global cooling.

Obama’s infomercial last night was a failure:

Two leading infomercial stars agree: Barack Obama’s half-hour self-promotion last night was a flop.

“I don’t see enough smiling. Doom and gloom totally,” said Anthony Sullivan, one of the biggest names in infomercial history.

Its funny to think about the presidential campaign being compared to the Soloflex and Ron Popeil’s pasta maker. I guess such comparisons are inevitable when one of the candidates allows millions of dollars from large corporations fill his coffers. Right Darwin?

Its about 20 minutes but well worth it.