When gnats look like behemoths.

NOTE: Your Tatler, after taking a well-unearned break, is resuming blogging. To ease the way back into my craft, as it were, this return post will feature an essayist more able than I and who will do the heavy lifting.

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News item:

Biden’s Approval Rating Tanks Near All-Time Lows As Country Continues Downward Spiral

With the present occupant of the White House increasingly becoming an embarrassment to our nation, both here and abroad, liberals, especially well-off white ones with book larnin’, i. e., the majority of them, are quietly pining nostalgically for President Obama, whom they regard as a mental colossus. That is forgivable when comparing him with President Biden, but a closer look at that alleged savant suggests there is much less to him than meets the eye.

An email received a few days ago from The Rev’d George Rutler confirms suspicions of the intellectual prowess, or lack thereof, of our former president. It takes the shape of an essay titled “The Shores of Tripoli: The Libyan Tragedy and Our Historically Challenged President,” written over a decade ago, which can be found in a collection of Father Rutler’s essays titled “Calm in Chaos: Catholic Wisdom for Anxious Times.” A few excerpts from that essay follow, with the author’s permission.

We begin with a quote not by Fr Rutler, but Barack Obama himself, from a speech he gave at a little institution of his: the annual “Iftar” dinner,”a feast at the end of day of Ramadan fasting, for assembled Muslims in the White House . . . “

As I’ve noted before, Thomas Jefferson once held a sunset dinner here with an envoy from Tunisia—perhaps the first Iftar at the White House, more than 200 years ago. And some of you, as you arrived tonight, may have seen our special display, courtesy of our friends at the Library of Congress—the Koran that belonged to Thomas Jefferson. And that’s a reminder, along with the generations of patriotic Muslims in America, that Islam—like so many faiths—is part of our national story.

Fr Rutler’s response:

If I felt confident that President Obama could name some of the Hasmonean kings, I could point out that while they were “a part of the story” of Christianity, they were not so in a positive light. This might put into a better perspective any notion that the Treaty of Tripoli was anything like a free trade agreement, or that the Tunisian envoy’s dinner with Jefferson was a pleasant interlude, or that Jefferson’s purchase of “Holy Koran” was part of his quest for oriental wisdom. For one thing, Jefferson’s copy was an English translation published in 1734 by George Sale. As it was not in Arabic, it was not any more authentic in the opinion of Muslims than is Farrakhan’s “Nation of Islam” which the first Muslim congressman to whom Obama alluded, Keith Ellison,  assisted in some of its activities before he abjured it during his election campaign.

And further:

In the eighteenth century, Tripoli, along with the other Barbary Coast lands of Tunis and Algiers (being North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire) and Morocco, had been centers of piracy, preying with a special lust on the ships of the fledgling United States. In March of 1785, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met in London with the representative of the Dey of Algiers to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. They posed the simple question: Why were the Muslims so hostile to a new country that had done them no injury? Adams joined Jefferson in reporting to Congress through a letter to John Jay who was then Secretary of Foreign Affairs, that “Islam was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise.”

And the essay concludes:

How former presidents should occupy their time in retirement is not indicated by the Constitution, and they are free agents in that regard. They could spend some of their days boning up on history, but it would be better if they had known some history before being elected to become part of it.

The few quotes above should dispel notions of Barack Obama as intellectual Superman and there is much more debunking of him in Fr. Rutler’s essay not quoted here. Nevertheless, as Joe Biden sinks lower and lower, Barack Obama’s adoring claque, six years after their hero left office, continues to idolize him. What’s sad is, regardless of his limitations, Obama is likely brighter than any of the current leading lights, e.g., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in the Democratic Party today.