No Doubt

I haven't gotten around to reading Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father, but Thomas Sowell finally has and he found it revealing.

After reading Barack Obama's book Dreams from My Father, it became painfully clear that he has not been searching for the truth, because he assumed from an early age that he had already found the truth -- and now it was just a question of filling in the details and deciding how to change things.

Among the details that Obama got wrong, for example, are those that inform the simplistic story beginning in the 16th century of West European "exploitation" of the rest of the world.  That's not surprising.  The President and I are about the same age and I've heard that same story from self-loathing liberals my entire life.

However, Obama, apparently, has never seriously questioned any of those details, nor the many others that complete his liberal worldview.  He's just too sure of himself and that, for Sowell, for all of us, is a problem.

Barack Obama is one of those people who are often wrong but never in doubt. When he burst upon the national political scene as a presidential candidate in 2008, even some conservatives were impressed by his confidence. 

But confident ignorance is one of the most dangerous qualities in a leader of a nation. If he has the rhetorical skills to inspire the same confidence in himself by others, then you have the ingredients for national disaster.