Michelle Malkin has tweaked the other Michelle about her remembrance of things past — specifically, about [1] her memories of sitting in her daddy’s lap while watching Carl Lewis at the Olympics. The fact that Michelle O was 20 years old when Lewis first ran in the Olympics makes her remark a trifle unsettling. Well, okay, in fairness, MO started her sentence by referring to Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci, earlier competitors, but the sentence doesn’t parse in any way that is flattering either to her or to her dad. Maybe Barack was borrowing the teleprompter. And fair’s fair, W was pilloried for less creepy assaults on his mother tongue. As it were.

In any case, it put me in mind of our President’s strange detachment from facts about the past. There have been gross errors in interpretation, as when he expressed a belief that [2] leaders like FDR and Kennedy showed the path of virtue by negotiating with our enemies. Well, Kennedy did at least have a summit with Khrushchev, although the summit itself has been described as “disastrous”. But FDR never met with any Axis leader; nor was Joseph Stalin considered an enemy to the United States during FDR’s lifetime. But there have also been peculiar personal exaggerations, as when Obama [3] claimed his parents met because of the (1965) march on Selma — which happened four years after BHO was born. And he has engaged in unnecessary mangling of family history, too, as when he claimed [4] his uncle helped to liberate Auschwitz. Auschwitz, Buchenwald — so sue me!

My personal favorite is when he credited Muslims [5] with inventing the magnetic compass, an assertion that no doubt came as a surprise to [6] our Chinese friends. This claim came in his Cairo speech, in which he more egregiously (and erroneously) claimed that John Adams wrote “The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.” Those words appear in the English version of the text of the [7] [8] Treaty of Tripoli, and are attributed to Joel Barlow, not John Adams. Of course, the fact that Obama even thought it was a good idea to bring up the [7] [8] Treaty of Tripoli in an entreaty to the Muslim world is baffling. The Pasha of Tripoli abrogated the Treaty in 1801 when Jefferson refused to pay, initiating a chain of events that are memorialized in the [9] Marines’ Hymn.

Most recently, he [10] visited the United Nations and claimed “Democracy cannot be imposed on any nation from the outside.” Again, this is a very odd statement from a [11] self-proclaimed “student of history”. One imagines the German and Japanese Ambassadors exchanging puzzled glances over this claim, thinking their translators had malfunctioned.

I fear that we are led by a man whose “study” of history has been seriously distorted by [12] the Marxists he sought out on the Columbia campus, by [13] the race-baiter in the pews of whose church he sat for twenty years, by the [14] political allies he made in Chicago, and by the friends he has chosen [15] to man his administration and to [16] help draft legislation.

In [17] Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler urged his readers to understand the times in which they live, in order that they might participate in history and not merely stand outside as spectators. Obama seems to have intuited that, at this moment of world history, the Leader has no need for Comprehension, for Understanding of What Is, for Appreciation of What Has Gone Before, the Leader only has a need to have a vision of What the World Could Be. His dwindling but still-numerous followers seem to agree.

And [18] that is a cause for apprehension.