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Tuesday, May 31, 2011

L.A. Times Explains Obama’s ‘Intellectual Stammer’

By Don Irvine | May 31, 2011


til now the mainstream media have been at a loss to explain why their hero, President Obama, speaks so lucidly when using a teleprompter but frequently stumbles when his electronic aid isn’t available.

But thanks to Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Dunn we now have the answer. Obama’s brain is moving faster than his mouth creating what she calls an “intellectual stammer,” which is different from a stutter:

But consider this: It’s not that Obama can’t speak clearly. It’s that he employs the intellectual stammer. Not to be confused with a stutter, which the president decidedly does not have, the intellectual stammer signals a brain that is moving so fast that the mouth can’t keep up. The stammer is commonly found among university professors, characters in Woody Allen movies and public thinkers of the sort that might appear on C-SPAN but not CNN.

Dunn then goes on to compare Obama’s stammer to that of the late William F. Buckley, who was one of the 20th century’s greatest conservative thinkers:

That’s kind of ironic, given that the godfather of the intellectual stammer is arguably none other than the paterfamilias of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley Jr. With his slouch, his glazed-eyed stare and a speaking style that suggested the entire Oxford English Dictionary was flipping through his mind while he searched for a word like “dithyramb,” he makes Obama’s extemporaneous speech seem canned — not to mention pedestrian — by comparison.

There is little doubt that Buckley was an intellectual. The tougher case is to call Obama one.

Buckley acquired a great deal of knowledge in his life and was able to recall much of it at any given moment, whereas Obama tends to lean towards the more trivial due to his lack of knowledge and experience. In addition, he is burdened with having to choose his words carefully to continue the ruse that he is a centrist, and pro-business, when his background, past associations and radical appointments as President indicate quite the contrary.

Dunn has it wrong though. Obama doesn’t have an “intellectual stammer” but instead suffers from what I refer to as “intellectual deficit disorder,” where sans his beloved teleprompter his mind is searching for words that just aren’t there.

This is just the latest example of the Obama-loving mainstream media’s concerted efforts to explain away the President’s shortcomings. Unfortunately it won’t be the last, as the 2012 election draws closer.

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