Conservatives blast Obama for gaffe

Even the liberal Talking Points Memo criticized a recent speech in which President Obama revealed his ignorance of U.S. and world history and disparaged a past U.S. President while denouncing the alleged ignorance of others. In a recent green energy speech, Obama mocked Republicans, “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,” TPM notes, since President Hayes was a supporter of new technologies who had “the first telephone in the White House,” “the first typewriter in the White House,” hosted Thomas Edison, and pioneered the use of photography at White House events. Moreover, people in Columbus’s day new perfectly well that the Earth was round, as Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould has noted. Those skeptical of Columbus’ planned voyage just thought that Asia — Columbus’s planned destination — was too far away to reach across the Atlantic (Columbus didn’t manage to reach Asia, but he did inadvertently discover America)....