Thomas Sowell: Obama Has Confident Ignorance

Ronald Reagan once said “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but they know so much that isn’t so.”  Thomas Sowell has taken a similar stand except he says Obama is indeed ignorant by choice and that his confidence in that ignornance is dangerous.

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?

His statement in “Dreams from My Father” about how white men went to
Africa to “drag away the conquered in chains” betrays his ignorance of
African history.

The era of the Atlantic slave trade and the era of European conquests
across the continent of Africa were different eras. During the era of
the Atlantic slave trade, most of Africa was ruled by Africans, who sold
some of their slaves to white men.

European conquests in Africa had to wait until Europeans found some
way to survive lethal African diseases, to which they lacked resistance.
Only after medical science learned to deal with these diseases could
the era of European conquests spread across sub-Saharan Africa. But the
Atlantic slave trade was over by then.

There was no reason why Barack Obama had to know this. But there was
also no reason for him to be shooting off his mouth without knowing what
he was talking about.

This fear of European “exploitation” prevailed widely in the Third
World in the middle of the 20th century. But, by the late 20th century,
the falseness of that view had been demonstrated so plainly and so
often, in countries around the world, that even socialist and communist
governments began opening their economies to foreign investments. This
often led to rising economic growth rates that lifted millions of people
out of poverty.

Barack Obama is one of those people who are often wrong but never in
doubt. When he burst upon the national political scene as a presidential
candidate in 2008, even some conservatives were impressed by his
confidence.

But confident ignorance is one of the most dangerous qualities in a
leader of a nation. If he has the rhetorical skills to inspire the same
confidence in himself by others, then you have the ingredients for
national disaster.[RCP]

You might have to do some research on your own which is the one thing Obama is counting on his supporters to avoid.  If there was ever a false prophet in the world, he is it.