"To create a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs."

From the brilliant Thomas Sowell: "The Brainy Bunch" (via NRO):

"Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.It was, after all, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brilliant “brains trust” whose policies are now increasingly recognized as having prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s, rather than ending it. The U.S. emerged from the Great Depression only when the Second World War put an end to many New Deal policies."....

"Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson’s administration — especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant “whiz kids” tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs."...

"Make no mistake about it, Adolf Hitler was brilliant. His underlying beliefs may have been half-baked and his hatreds overwhelming, but he was a political genius when it came to carrying out his plans based on those beliefs and hatreds....

"Someone recently pointed out how much Barack Obama’s style and strategies resemble those of Latin American charismatic despots — the takeover of industries by demagogues who never ran a business, the rousing rhetoric of resentment addressed to the masses, and the personal cult of the leader promoted by the media. Do we want to become the world’s largest banana republic?

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2009 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Read the whole article: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjVmMzc1MjVmYjdkNzcxNzExNTE4NzljMzBmZmMzNjI=