Is Obama Smart?  It’s a question that more and more people are asking.  His devoted fans like to note that he made it through Columbia and Harvard—supposedly a stark contrast to Rick Perry’s less-than-stellar transcript from Texas A&M, though Obama’s refusal to release his own transcripts does blunt the comparison.

More to the point though, the evidence seems conflicting.  On the one hand, he ran a remarkable campaign in 2008.  He sensed what the American people needed to hear, and he emerged from nowhere to defeat vastly more qualified opponents.  On the other hand, his performance as President has been dismal.  Most Americans recognize that his policy preferences range from the irrelevant to the counterproductive, and leftists contend that he has been ineffectual in pursuit of their agenda.

So is Obama smart?  Yes.  Obama is a certain kind of smart.  Unfortunately, it’s the wrong kind.  President Obama is the sort of smart that our finest institutions recognize, promote, and reward.  There is no surer path to academic success than learning the orthodoxy of your field and the particular bent of your professor; explaining why only those blessed with suitable experience, training, and insight can comprehend the complex problem under consideration; and then parroting the professor’s previously articulated answers shortly before he or she reveals them to the class.  Mastery of this skill continues to pay dividends in the real world, most prominently among business consultants versed in telling corporate boards what they want to hear, and attorneys capable of tailoring their arguments to the predispositions of the judges before whom they appear.

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Attorney General Eric Holder has a peculiar tendency to set loose militant black panthers.  Everyone is already familiar with the dismissal of the voter intimidation case I brought as a Justice Department attorney.  There, the DOJ dropped claims against Malik Zulu Shabazz, national head of the New Black Panther Party, and Jerry Jackson, a Philadelphia panther and Democratic Party official.  But Jackson and Shabazz aren’t the only militants Holder has set loose.

Marilyn Buck was a Marxist terrorist who participated in conspiracies that led to the deaths of multiple police officers.  Buck helped the Black Liberation Army, a violent Marxist offshoot of the black panthers, acquire weapons and ammunition.  She participated in the robbery of an armored car where a guard was murdered.  If that wasn’t enough, Buck was also charged with the bombing of the U.S. Senate, Ft. McNair, the Washington Navy Yard Officer’s Club and a New York City federal building.  In many states, Buck’s behavior might have led to a midnight reservation in the electric chair.

Yet Holder’s DOJ unlocked Buck’s jail cell and set her free last summer. Justice concluded that Buck “expressed a dramatic change from her previous political philosophy.”  Releasing Buck reflects an alien attitude that has caused the Obama years to be characterized by an ideological disconnect with most Americans.

The letters which persuaded the Justice Department were stuffed with crackpot arguments and have yet to be reported over the last year.  They are full of lawlessness and arguments from extreme fringes of political thought.  What’s worse, the letters are on the letterhead of government and private institutions, institutions most Americans incorrectly think are worthy of respect.

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When Dwayne Whitney started his trucking business decades ago he had only one truck. Today he has eighteen and 20 employees. But that’s about to change.

“The State of California says my trucks are killing people,” says Whitney. “What do you say to that?”

In a few years, new air quality regulations approved by the California Air Resources Board will render Whitney’s entire fleet illegal.

“New CARB rules are putting me out of business,” he says.

CARB claims that diesel particulates, a type of pollution emitted from buses and trucks, contributes to 2,000 premature deaths in California each year. But UCLA epidemiologist Dr. James Enstrom says the number should be closer to zero.

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Statistically, Harvey Mansfield should be a raging liberal.  He’s been at Harvard since 1949.  In 2008, 93% of Harvard faculty political contributions were to Democrats.  At Yale in the same year it was 94%.  While it is no secret that America’s colleges and universities are bastions of liberalism, Harvey Mansfield in our latest episode discusses how that happened and the effect that it has on our society.

The short answer to why faculty at impressive academic institutions are so left leaning is: they can’t help it.  As Mansfield says, they are so insular – always in their own world – the prime example of an echo chamber.

One of the first casualties of the liberal stranglehold on the academy is a healthy emphasis on Western Civilization.  As liberals rose in prominence in American universities, starting in the late 1960s, Western Civilization classes came under fire.  Great books classes, Mansfield argues, introduce students to timeless problems and questions.  Thinking through concepts like “what is the Good Life?” or “is it a good thing to be ambitious?” or “what is the relationship between philosophy and theology?” is essential to developing one’s ability to identify truth and virtue.  With liberals in charge, these classes were labeled as “narrow minded” and were replaced by anti-Western courses that sought to apologize for the power and prominence of Western Civilization.

For more on that and other topics, like rampant grade inflation and the soft despotism of sensitivity, watch the full episode below:

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Well, the admissions just keep on coming. In the UK, lead canary for all things “climate change” — for example, polls show a majority of their public now see the agenda as just a new excuse for the state to extract more wealth from its citizens — we have a paper by the Tyndall Centre for  Climate Change Research saying the agenda demands “reducing the size of the economy through a ‘planned recession’”, in the words of the Daily Telegraph. Tyndall is an activist consortium of British academic institutions known for carrying the banner on the “climate” agenda.

The Telegraph offers an eye-catching sub-head: ” Britain will have to stop building airports, switch to electric cars and shut down coal-fired power stations as part of a ‘planned recession’ to avoid dangerous climate change.”

This should only surprise you if you have relied upon claims by the global warming industry — itself a consortium of activists inside and outside of government, Big Science, Big Academia, and other rent-seeking industry crafting schemes to profit in the near-term from the wealth-transfers — or the Obama administration, desperate to walk-back the president’s admission that his plan of cap-and-trade will “bankrupt” all sorts of facilities and cause your energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket.”

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