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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: Soul Crusher on March 15, 2012, 01:04:25 PM
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RutherfordGate: Historian Responds to President Obama’s Hayes Slur
By Dan Amira
Rutherford B. Hayes: Very much pro-phone.
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/03/rutherford-b-hayes-obama-telephone.html
It's not unusual for President Obama to criticize his Republican predecessors from time to time, but this morning, he targeted his scorn not at George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, but ... Rutherford B. Hayes. As Politico reported:
Speaking about the need to develop new sources of American energy in Largo, Md., Obama used our 19th president as a failure of forward-thinking leadership.
"One of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone: 'It’s a great invention but who would ever want to use one?'" Obama said. "That's why he's not on Mt. Rushmore."
"He's looking backwards, he's not looking forward. He's explaining why we can't do something instead of why we can do something," Obama said.
Burn.
We thought it was a bit unsporting of Obama to attack President Hayes, who is quite unable to respond. So we called up the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio, where Nan Card, the curator of manuscripts, was plenty willing to correct Obama's ignorance of White House history. Just as soon as she finished chuckling.
"I've heard that before, and no one ever knows where it came from," Card said of Hayes's alleged phone remark, "but people just keep repeating it and repeating it, so it's out there."
Wait, so Hayes didn't even say the quote that Obama is mocking him for? "No, no," Card confirmed.
She then read aloud a newspaper article from June 29, 1877, which describes Hayes's delight upon first experiencing the magic of the telephone. The Providence Journal story reported that as Hayes listened on the phone, "a gradually increasing smile wreathe[d] his lips and wonder shone in his eyes more and more.” Hayes took the phone from his ear, "looked at it a moment in surprise and remarked, 'That is wonderful.'"
In fact, Card noted, Hayes was not only the first president to have a telephone in the White House, but he was also the first to use the typewriter, and he had Thomas Edison come to the White House to demonstrate the phonograph. "So I think he was pretty much cutting edge," Card insisted, "maybe just the opposite of what President Obama had to say there."
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No wonder 240 is still so madly in love with obama. He loves to lie without compunction to sell his communist agenda.
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http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/03/rutherford-b-hayes-obama-telephone.html
240 - will you admit obama lied his ass off today?
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/03/15/obama_knocks_former_presidents_for_not_being_progressive_enough-comments.html
Does this scumbag and hitlerian thug ever wear a jacket any more?
This is really revolting.
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;D. Bfl.
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RutherfordGate: Historian Responds to President Obama’s Hayes Slur
By Dan Amira
Rutherford B. Hayes: Very much pro-phone.
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/03/rutherford-b-hayes-obama-telephone.html
It's not unusual for President Obama to criticize his Republican predecessors from time to time, but this morning, he targeted his scorn not at George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, but ... Rutherford B. Hayes. As Politico reported:
Speaking about the need to develop new sources of American energy in Largo, Md., Obama used our 19th president as a failure of forward-thinking leadership.
"One of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone: 'It’s a great invention but who would ever want to use one?'" Obama said. "That's why he's not on Mt. Rushmore."
"He's looking backwards, he's not looking forward. He's explaining why we can't do something instead of why we can do something," Obama said.
Burn.
We thought it was a bit unsporting of Obama to attack President Hayes, who is quite unable to respond. So we called up the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio, where Nan Card, the curator of manuscripts, was plenty willing to correct Obama's ignorance of White House history. Just as soon as she finished chuckling.
"I've heard that before, and no one ever knows where it came from," Card said of Hayes's alleged phone remark, "but people just keep repeating it and repeating it, so it's out there."
Wait, so Hayes didn't even say the quote that Obama is mocking him for? "No, no," Card confirmed.
She then read aloud a newspaper article from June 29, 1877, which describes Hayes's delight upon first experiencing the magic of the telephone. The Providence Journal story reported that as Hayes listened on the phone, "a gradually increasing smile wreathe[d] his lips and wonder shone in his eyes more and more.” Hayes took the phone from his ear, "looked at it a moment in surprise and remarked, 'That is wonderful.'"
In fact, Card noted, Hayes was not only the first president to have a telephone in the White House, but he was also the first to use the typewriter, and he had Thomas Edison come to the White House to demonstrate the phonograph. "So I think he was pretty much cutting edge," Card insisted, "maybe just the opposite of what President Obama had to say there."
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No wonder 240 is still so madly in love with obama. He loves to lie without compunction to sell his communist agenda.
Regardless as to whether it was true or not, it was not a good idea for Obama say anything about Rutherford B Haynes. He defended slaves at his law firm against the Fugitive Slave Act, was a Union General who fought in the civil war, helped get blacks scholarships to attend college like WEB Dubious....and that's why he's not on Mt Rushmore :P
RB Haynes was a good guy and this may actually come back on him if anyone does any research. He was definitely a progressive person who fought against the injustices of slavery and racism...and at a time where he could have seriously got his shit beat in
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You think obama gives a damn? He is interested in one thing and one thing only - his re-election - truth, policy, and the betterment of the nation be damned.
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Regardless as to whether it was true or not, it was not a good idea for Obama say anything about Rutherford B Haynes. He defended slaves at his law firm against the Fugitive Slave Act, was a Union General who fought in the civil war, helped get blacks scholarships to attend college like WEB Dubious....and that's why he's not on Mt Rushmore :P
So why is Lincoln on Mt. Rushmore?
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March 16, 2012
Obama Flubs U.S. History -- Again
By Carl M. Cannon
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By Carl M. Cannon
He wasn't born in Kenya, and he attended some of this country's finest schools, but as he demonstrated anew on Thursday, Barack Obama shares with his fellow Americans one of their most dubious national traits: a nonchalant disregard for historical accuracy.
In an age when Twitter and other social media can propagate with distressing efficiency the fake Lincoln quote, the false Twain quip, the invented Ben Franklin advice, Obama is a president for our times.
Speaking yesterday about energy, the president found it necessary to casually slander Rutherford B. Hayes. In Obama’s telling, Hayes was a Luddite who, when confronted with the invention of the telephone, wondered who would ever want to use one.
“That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore,” Obama intoned. “He’s explaining why we can’t do something instead of why we can do something.”
It’s hard to know where to begin unraveling this, but a good place to start is the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, where resident scholar Nan Card confirmed to any journalist who bothered calling her -- which is more than you can say for the White House speechwriting crew -- that Hayes never said anything of the kind about the telephone, or any other invention.
According to contemporaneous accounts, what Hayes really said when he first used the phone was, “That is wonderful.”
In fact, Hayes installed the first telephone in the White House, along with the first typewriter, and invited Thomas Edison in for a visit to show off the phonograph -- and was no one’s idea of a technophobe. “He really was the opposite,” Card told Benjy Sarlin of Talking Points Memo. “Between the telephone, the telegraph, the phonograph, and photography, I think he was pretty much on the cutting edge.”
This is not first time Obama and his communications team have fallen for a quote they apparently ripped from the Internet.
In the waning days of his 2008 campaign, then-Sen. Obama criticized Republicans with this statement: “Abraham Lincoln once said to one of his opponents, ‘If you stop telling lies about me, I’ll start telling truth about you.’ ”
(If that quote doesn’t sound like Lincoln, that’s because it wasn’t. Adlai Stevenson, another Illinois Democrat, was fond of this line. So was William Randolph Hearst, who used it when he ran for governor of New York in 1906, although Sen. Chauncey Depew, another New Yorker, employed it back in the 19th Century.)
Although tradition holds that a president’s words are his own, some of this stuff comes from careless staff work, and some comes when he’s just winging it. Given the demands of modern presidential politicking, no one is going to be perfect. But that doesn’t explain why, as president, Obama keeps discussing the “Intercontinental Railroad,” supposedly built in the United States in the 19th Century. (It was called the Transcontinental Railroad, and crossed no oceans.)
In his very first news conference as president-elect, Obama was asked if he’d spoken with any former presidents in preparation for taking office. He replied that he’d talked with all the ex-presidents “that are living,” adding with a smile, “I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about doing any séances.”
(Besides being mean-spirited -- and Obama quickly phoned Mrs. Reagan to apologize -- this was inaccurate: Nancy Reagan consulted an astrologer; she didn’t converse with the dead.)
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A couple of months later, the second paragraph of Obama’s inaugural address contained another historical mistake. “Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath,” he said. (Not quite. While Obama is the 44th president, 43 men have taken the oath. Grover Cleveland, because his terms were not contiguous, is counted as both the 22nd and the 24th chief executive. Two presidents, but only one American.)
This kind of fact-checking can come across as pedantic. Even his most persistent critics don’t believe, for instance, that Obama really thinks there are 57 states in this country, as he said in a moment of exhaustion at the tail end of the 2008 campaign.
But some conservatives have noticed that Republicans are invariably at the butt end of Obama’s historic flights of fancy. Asked during his first few months to explain his rationale for banning waterboarding and releasing the previous administration’s “torture memos,” Obama gave this answer:
“I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, ‘We don’t torture,’ when . . . all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. . . . Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.”
(Except that it was blogger Andrew Sullivan who said those things, not Winston Churchill. The “article” Obama was reading was, let’s just say, underreported. The British did torture German prisoners during World War II. Not to mention the 16 Nazis hunted down by the British and assassinated after the war while Churchill was prime minister. )
But social media is good for more than disseminating untruths. It’s also very good at poking fun at those who promulgate them in the first place.
A new hash tag on Twitter, #BarackObamasPresidentialFacts, popped up yesterday, full of the clever irreverence we’ve come to expect:
“James A. Garfield loved lasagna and hated Mondays,” tweeted one wag.
“Before winning the White House, Warren G. Harding and his running mate, ‘Nate Dogg,’ had 4 platinum albums,” proclaimed another.
“Ulysses S. Grant was our first Greek president,” proclaimed a third.
A whimsical Abe Lincoln made a cameo on #BarackObamasPresidentialFacts, just as he did in the real Obama’s memory banks: “Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin where he invented pancake syrup,”
But as Lincoln said -- or was it Mark Twain? -- truth is the first casualty of war. (Actually, that sentiment is originally Samuel Johnson’s. “Among the calamities of war,” Johnson wrote in 1758, “may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.”)
That quote is more than 140 characters, but it’s worth remembering nonetheless.
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Carl M. Cannon is the Washington Editor for RealClearPolitics.
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/03/16/obama_flubs_us_history_--_again_113502-full.html at March 16, 2012 - 06:04:05 AM PDT
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Obama Mangles U.S., World History In Energy Speech
President Obama addresses AIPAC on Sunday, March 4, 2012
President Obama got a laugh out of a Maryland audience on Thursday when he mocked the Republican Party in a speech, comparing their skepticism of alternative energy to the “Flat Earth Society” in Christopher Columbus’ day and President Rutherford B. Hayes’ apparent dismissal of the telephone. But while Obama thinks the GOP is in need of a science lesson, he may need to bone up on history himself.
In mocking the GOP, Obama cited an anecdote about Hayes in which, upon using the telephone for the first time, he said, “It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?”
“That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore,” Obama said. “He’s explaining why we can’t do something instead of why we can do something.”
But Nan Card, curator of manuscripts at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio, told TPM that the nation’s 19th president was being unfairly tagged as a Luddite.
“He really was the opposite,” she said. “He had the first telephone in the White House. He also had the first typewriter in the White House. Thomas Edison came to the White House as well and displayed the phonograph. Photographing people who came to the White House and visited at dinners and receptions was also very important to him.”
While often cited, Card said Obama’s cited quote had never been confirmed by contemporary sources and is likely apocryphal. A contemporary newspaper account of his first experience with telephone in 1877 from the Providence Journal records a smiling Hayes repeatedly responding to the voice on the other line with the phrase, “That is wonderful.” You can read the full story here.
“He was pretty technology-oriented for the time,” Card said. “Between the telephone, the telegraph, the phonograph and photography, I think he was pretty much on the cutting edge.”
As for why he’s not on Mt. Rushmore, Card noted that popular history tends to favor wartime presidents in the long run. To be fair, modern historians aren’t too hot on Hayes either in their rankings.
Obama’s invocation of the “flat earth” theory in the context of Christopher Columbus’ journey across the ocean also contained some dubious (if incredibly widespread) history.
“If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society,” Obama said. “They would not have believed that the world was round.”
In fact, historians have long contended that the notion Europeans widely believed the Earth was flat, let alone 15th century Spanish scholars, is a myth developed centuries later. From the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s 1995 book “Dinosaur In a Haystack”:
There never was a period of “flat earth darkness” among scholars (regardless of how many uneducated people may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology. Ferdinand and Isabella did refer Columbus’s plans to a royal commission headed by Hernando de Talavera, Isabella’s confessor and, following defeat of the Moors, Archbishop of Granada. This commission, composed of both clerical and lay advisers, did meet, at Salamanca among other places. They did pose some sharp intellectual objections to Columbus, but all assumed the earth’s roundness. As a major critique, they argued that Columbus could not reach the Indies in his own allotted time, because the earth’s circumference was too great. Moreover, his critics were entirely right. Columbus had “cooked” his figures to favor a much smaller earth, and an attainable Indies. Needless to say, he did not and could not reach Asia, and Native Americans are still called Indians as a legacy of his error.As far as muddled historic references go, Obama’s hardly the first presidential candidate to screw things up on the trail. But for an address specifically going after his opponents for their ignorance, it’s probably not great to have a “citation needed” banner on top of his speech.
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Regardless as to whether it was true or not, it was not a good idea for Obama say anything about Rutherford B Haynes. He defended slaves at his law firm against the Fugitive Slave Act, was a Union General who fought in the civil war, helped get blacks scholarships to attend college like WEB Dubious....and that's why he's not on Mt Rushmore :P
"As for why he’s not on Mt. Rushmore, Card noted that popular history tends to favor wartime presidents in the long run."
Thanks 3333 for the answer.
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So why is Lincoln on Mt. Rushmore?
Lincoln may have rode on a guy's back to the presidency with words of "freeing the slaves" but his actions speak otherwise. In some ironic instances, the South actually cared more about blacks than the North ever did if you actually read some history books. For example, most people don't know that the first black army in the Civil War were forced to charge Confederates.....which may not sound bad until you hear the part where they were given SPEARS instead of guns. Can you fucking imagine being told to charge into a battlefield with some fucking spears against artillery and rifles blazing at you???.... :P
Or how about the fact that a black Union soliders pay was 8 dollars a month minus food, clothes, and shelter while a white Union soldier got 13 dollars a month with no expense. Lincoln got a much better deal on niggas than the South ever could have gotten.
In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.
Robert E. Lee who also ran an illegal school for blacks on his Arlington plantation helping them read and write and get an education.
This is the reason why I don't have a harsh opinion of the Confederacy as I used to. While my great great grandparents where mistreated when they were slaves, after reading numerous history books, I've come to the conclusion that it would have been screwed either way even if they were free and in the North.
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Sad to say, but I agree w Vince. The older I get, the more I understand the souths position in the CW. ot about slavery, which is evil and satanic, but in terms of a federal govt running everyone's life.