Obama’s ‘flat earth’ speech reveals his own ignorance of history — and his staff’s reliance on Wikipedia

Why Mark Steyn makes the big bucks:

Given that the ol’ Hayes telephone sidesplitter turned out to be a bust, I wondered about the others. (…)

So let’s see. The president sneers at the ignorance of 15th century Spaniards when, in fact, he is the one entirely ignorant of them.

A man who has enjoyed a million dollars of elite education yet has never created a dime of wealth in his life sneers at a crippled farm boy with an eighth-grade schooling who establishes a successful business and introduces electrical distribution across Michigan all the way up to Sault Ste Marie.

A man sneers at one of the pioneering women in broadcasting, a lady who brought the voices of T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton and others into the farthest-flung classrooms and would surely have rejected Obama’s own dismal speech as being too obviously reliant on “Half-A-Dozen Surefire Cheap Cracks For Lazy Public Speakers.”

A man whose own budget officials predict the collapse of the entire U.S. economy by 2027 sneers at a solvent predecessor for being insufficiently “forward-looking.”

A great nation needs successful self-made businessmen like George Peck, and purveyors of scholarly excellence like Mary Somerville. It’s not clear why it needs a smug over-credentialed President Solyndra to recycle “Crowd-Pleasing For Dummies” as a keynote address.