Don't They Speak African Over There?

UPDATE: It seems that this story about Palin is a fabrication.

In the wake of the election, embittered McCain aides and others are opening the floodgates of recrimination against Sarah Palin. It appears that Ms. Palin was unaware that Africa is a continent, rather than a country.

I have sympathy for the campaign aides who had to deal with this fundamental lack of knowledge; I face the same kind of thing every single day. On the other hand, I teach eleven-year-olds, so their ignorance is not an indication of their own personal failure so much as an indication of what I need to teach next week. (Admittedly, some of my students will end the year not knowing the difference between a continent and a country, despite my best efforts. Perhaps they, too, can run for Vice President of the United States.)

Afghanistan: Land of Contrasts, Our Neighbor to the East

There's something about the Middle East that confuses even the best of us. I'm not only talking about finding the One True Path to Mideast Peace here; I'm talking also about the simple geography of the area.

Any seventh grader worth his or her salt should be able to give you a rough idea of which countries are considered part of the Middle East; at the very least, said student would be able to tell you that the region is nowhere within thousands of miles of These United States. Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin? Not so much:

SAN FRANCISCO - Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin called Afghanistan “our neighboring country” on Sunday in a speech that could revive questions over her tendency to stumble into linguistic knots.

Three days after a mostly gaffe-free debate performance, the Alaska governor fumbled during a speech in which she praised U.S. soldiers for “fighting terrorism and protecting us and our democratic values”.

“They are also building schools for the Afghan children so that there is hope and opportunity in our neighboring country of Afghanistan,” she told several hundred supporters at a fundraising event in San Francisco.

This kind of thing--and the way it was portrayed in the article--raises the question of precisely how we can distinguish between a candidate's innocent misstatement and his or her jaw-dropping lack of knowledge about the world in which we live. Did Palin commit a flub because she is currently spewing roughly one trillion words per day (some of which are bound to be mistakes), or was this a genuine glimpse into her confusion about how the planet is put together? The world may never know.

"If General McClellan--oops, McKiernan--does not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a time."

Not to get into the whole "Who won the debate?" thing (except that, unfortunately, Palin had clearly won the debate about halfway through, so I gave up in despair and went to clip my toenails), but one would think that Afghanistan, fer chrissakes, is prominent enough on our national radar that you would bother getting the stuff right.

I know, I know: we've only been at war there for seven years. Some might say that this is not long enough to figure out who's who and what's what. If you're running for vice president, however, you might want to give it a shot:

Sarah Palin gets wrong both the commanding general in Afghanistan's name and position.The commanding general in Afghanistan didn't merely state that Surge tactics won't work! He also said that tribal involvement in the COIN strategy wouldn't work either! Absolutely right on infrastructure in Afghanistan though! Know what they really need in Afghanistan to enhance security? ROADS.

Palin thinks our commander in Afghanistan is someone named "McClellan." It is, I believe, McKiernan. And Palin is DEAD WRONG. He absolutely said that tribal involvement in Afghanistan COIN strategy would not work.

McKiernan: "I do think there's a role for traditional tribal authorities and tribal structure in Afghanistan, in the rural areas especially, to play in a community-based sense of security, of connection with the government, and of environmental considerations. But I think that has to be led, that tribal engagement, it has to be led by the Afghan government. I specifically tell my chain of command in ISAF [International Security Assistance Force, the name for NATO's mission in Afghanistan] that I don't want the military to be engaging the tribes to do that. It has to be through the Afghan government to do that. But of course, there's danger in that. There's always, "Is this particular tribe, is it being reached out to for all the right reasons?" That has to be watched very closely."

McKiernan: "First of all, please don't think that I'm saying there's no room for tribal engagement in Afghanistan, because I think it's very necessary. But I think it's much more complex environment of tribal linkages, and intertribal complexity than there is in Iraq. It's not as simple as taking the Sunni Awakening and doing the Pashtun Awakening in Afghanistan. It's much more complex than that."

It's a damned good thing that McClellan isn't our general in Afghanistan; Lincoln isn't around to send him dryly sarcastic notes before ultimately tossing him out on his butt for incompetence.

All roads lead to the Middle East

Ben Smith reports the latest McCain geographical head-scratcher:

A Democrat sends over this clip from John McCain's economic forum just now, in which McCain, talking about energy policy, stresses the importance of "ensuring that America is secure, and not dependent on oil from people like Hugo Chavez or other parts of the Middle East which is, we know, could be destabilized under certain sets of circumstances."

I teach seventh-grade history and geography. Right now we're learning the countries of the Middle East as part of our unit on Islam. It is my sincere hope and expectation that a class of twelve-year-olds will demonstrate more geographic knowledge than McCain does in this clip.

Don't you agree that these guys should have to pass some kind of test?

Remember when Lincoln flew in his jetpack around the battlefield at Gettysburg before leaving to help fight the Nazis in the Philippines?

In re: history as useful myth, Biden tried to conjure the ghost of FDR as a lesson on leadership during the current financial meltdown. Unfortunately, nearly every single historical fact he cited in his talk was incorrect:

Joe Biden’s denunciation of his own campaign’s ad to Katie Couric got so much attention last night that another odd note in the interview slipped by.

He was speaking about the role of the White House in a financial crisis.

“When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed,” Biden told Couric. “He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”

How ignorant is this statement? Let me count the ways:

1. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t become president in 1929 during the crash. He won the 1932 election and took office in 1933, largely because of the 1929 crash and the incompetent protectionist policies that transformed it into a Great Depression.
2. If FDR and President Herbert Hoover didn’t talk about the “princes of greed” in 1929, by the time FDR took over, that kind of populist rhetoric had certainly taken root. FDR greatly escalated the scope of federal government to institute the kind of redistributionism that Obama and Biden now champion.
3. If Hoover or FDR appeared on television in 1929 or even 1933, only a few hundred people would have seen it. Television was still an experimental medium and wouldn’t be introduced to the public for at least another decade.

Certainly there's a point to be made here by ringing in FDR; just get it right, buddy, will you?

Who's on first; What's on second.

One of the things we're hoping is that our president knows the names of the major world leaders he has to deal with on a daily basis. Not knowing that Johannes Adam Ferdinand Alois Josef Maria Marko d'Aviano Pius von und zu Liechtenstein is the Sovereign Prince of Liechtenstein is one thing; not knowing who's running Pakistan is quite another.

At the first of the 2008 Presidential debates, it seems that McCain had a little trouble keeping the players straight without a scorecard:

Democrats picking over the remains of the debate are not only pleased to find that John McCain didn’t mention the middle class, but he had surprising number of foreign policy slips.

The one that leapt out was McCain, kinda like George Bush in 2000, getting the name of Pakistan’s president wrong. (Bush didn’t know it.)

“Now, the new president of Pakistan, Qadari (it’s actually Asif Ali Zardari), has got his hands full,” McCain said.

He also said, “I don’t think that Sen. Obama understands that there was a failed state in Pakistan when Musharraf came to power,” referring to former President Pervez Musharraf, who took power in a coup 1999. Although Pakistan sure had problems, many people didn’t regard the country, then a nuclear-armed one, as a failed state.

McCain also stumbled over pronouncing such things as Ahmadinejad and Taliban, and as we noted last night, he confused Iran’s Revolutionary Guard with Iraq’s Republican Guard, prompting Obama to make the same error.

He also seemed a bit off on his history, when he declared that Eisenhower wrote two letters before leading the Normandy invasion on D-Day, with one offering his resignation. Actually, Ike offered to accept responsibility.

The Eisenhower thing you can almost understand--as a society we often find history more useful as myth than as fact, and we frequently make allowances for that--but when these unforced errors begin to pile up, you wonder whether a candidate has the requisite knowledge to function on a day-to-day basis.

The time has come

Testing is a part of our national culture. We want to know that our experts are, in fact, actually expert in whatever it is that they're going to do.

Elementary school teachers have to pass tests of general knowledge before they can get their credentials, and secondary teachers need to pass subject-specific exams. Doctors, of course, have to pass tests before they can care for the sick, and lawyers need to demonstrate that they know the law. Contractors have to pass tests before they can get their licenses. Heck--even realtors need to pass tests before they can be trusted to sell houses.

How is it, then, that the most powerful person on the planet doesn't actually have to display any real knowledge of anything at all?

The Constitution lays out three qualifications for anyone who would be President of the United States: be at least thirty-five years old, be a natural-born citizen, and have been a permanent resident of the United States for the previous fourteen years. That's it. There's no official expectation of any knowledge of history, economics, current events or, in fact, anything at all before one becomes President. Case in point.

As a matter of fact, if a candidate actually knows her ass from her elbow--and then has the temerity to display that knowledge on the campaign trail--she has immediately opened herself up to charges of being an "elitist."

Maybe it's time for this to change. If we can reasonably expect plumbers to know what they're doing before they start working on our toilets, certainly we can expect the President of the United States to have some understanding of the world before we hand over the keys to the most powerful nation on the planet. If we can demand that high school students pass an exam before they graduate, we can demand that the leader of the free world know something about that free world before he takes charge.

In short, it is time for a Constitutional amendment requiring the President to pass a comprehensive test of knowledge before he or she can take the oath of office.

The details of what such a test would look like can be hammered out later. The key here for us all to agree that knowledge is a good thing, and that knowledge on the part of our leaders is, perhaps, the best thing of all.