Lafree makes a false experience argument

Let me preface my letter by pointing out that I haven’t seen or heard anybody compare Barack Obama to Ronald Reagan, so I think the question is rather pointless. But since Krista Lafree exploits the fact that some chump on some Web site makes the comparison as an excuse to write a bitter, vapid attack on Obama’s qualifications, let me address her argument.

Lafree first argues that Reagan indisputably had more experience prior to becoming president than Obama has now. Pardon my skepticism, but Reagan’s eight years as governor don’t strike me as undeniably more relevant than Obama’s combined eight years as a state legislator and four years as a U.S. senator (not to mention his tenure on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations).

But her comparison of the two politicians’ careers goes from being merely biased to outright comical when she looks at their non-political positions.

She apparently doesn’t see the irony in ridiculing Obama’s tenure as editor of the Harvard Law Review (which she apparently thinks involves “slashing sentences and cutting commas”) while simultaneously listing Reagan’s role as president of the Screen Actors Guild as relevant experience.

Think that’s bad? She even brings up Reagan’s days as high school student body president. I guess that is executive experience. Take that, community organizers!
 
Perhaps one of the most absurd statements I’ve ever seen comes when she says of Obama’s position of “Senior Lecturer” at the University of Chicago Law School: “Does this make my teaching assistants qualified to be vice president?”

Aside from the usual sneering at elite educational qualifications that is so endemic to modern conservatism, the irony is apparently lost on her that teaching assistants at any law school would at least be able to identify more than one Supreme Court case, unlike Sarah Palin.

In the meantime, Lafree manages to get in a snide comment about Ted Kennedy’s automobile accident (haha, that woman died, how hilarious). Oh yeah, and apparently the fact that a deranged, Jodie Foster-obsessed lunatic shot Reagan means that he “literally took a bullet for our country” and is thereby immune from criticism.

Brandon Wilkening
IU graduate student