re: #547 Ben Hur

Obama reads Pushkin

Look, I cannot take the so-called American Thinker seriously. They publish Jack Cashill and Atlas Shrieks, for gods sakes. And THIS is their big complaint about Obama?

Two weeks ago it was the Urdu poets. This week it’s Obama’s love for Pushkin’s poetry. The week before it was probably the Bhadavad-Gita in Sanskrit. If it’s Tuesday this must be Zorba the Greek —- in Greek.

It’s all in a day’s light reading for our Obama. Whaddaguy!

Wow!

We have an intellectual fraud in the White House. How do I know? Because poetry doesn’t translate. Ever try translating Shakespeare into American English?
This is not news. The Italians have a proverb, “Traditore, Traduttore!” —- translator, traitor. It probably sounds better in Italian, but then I don’t speak Italian. Or Urdu. Or Russian. I don’t actually speak a distressing number of the world’s languages. I’ll bet you don’t, either.

But I’ll get to it any day now. Promise.

What’s different about Our Zero is that:

(a) he even bothers to boast in public about his love for Pushkin and the Urdu poets; and

(b) he expects millions of suckers to believe it.

He’s an ‘intellectual fraud’ because he reads poetry in translation?

If this guy had his way presumably we should dismiss everyone who ever read Shakespeare, the Illiad, Beowulf, Dante, the Canterbury Tales, Pablo Neruda, and god knows what else in college as just a ‘fraud’, unless they also majored in old English, middle English, Attic Greek, Italian, etc. My guess is that would be most of us here.

Look, there are many good criticisms to make about Obama. This kind of crazy rant is on a level with nirtherism. And it fosters the kind of anti-intellectualism that so many are (incorrectly) coming to associate with the GOP and conservatism more generally.