Narcissist in Chief dumbs down history

by NW Spotlight

Back in May President Obama got chided for his shameless self promotion for hijacking the official White House biography web pages of past presidents. Because, you know, what relevance does anyone in history have if we don’t know how they are like Obama?

Well he’s at it again. This time, Obama’s State Department is dumbing down “Fact Sheets” on other countries into Obama “brag sheets”.

Seth Mandel at Commentary calls it “A Second Front in Obama’s War on History”, and Jim Roberts, writing in the Wall Street Journal, calls it a “messianic presidential prank-on-history.”

Roberts wrote in the WSJ “Of all the cyber-pools into which a modern-day Narcissus might gaze, surely the least likely would be the State Department’s long-running series of “Background Notes” on foreign countries. Yet in recent months, the Obama administration has taken to transforming these documents from straightforward reference items into PR puff sheets for the president.”

The article goes on to note how the Fact Sheets under President Bush contained, well, facts. They were documents full of information and statistics. Now under Obama, they are becoming “short on facts and long on the visits, programs and pronouncements of [Obama]. Call them brag sheets.”

Seth Mandel at Commentary concludes “That gets at the two problems with the change. First, the president is once again erasing history, or at the very least manipulating it, because in the fantasy world he is trying to project he seems far less unimpressive a president. But the larger problem is the president’s erasure of information. In the White House biographies, Obama didn’t actually erase history (though the White House was caught doing so in George W. Bush’s biography, but that obsessive pettiness doesn’t seem to have been applied elsewhere).”