Liz Cheney complains about President Obama’s ignorance of or distortion of history in the Wall Street Journal:
Perhaps Mr. Obama thinks he is making America inoffensive to our enemies. In reality, he is emboldening them and weakening us. America can be disarmed literally — by cutting our weapons systems and our defensive capabilities — as Mr. Obama has agreed to do. We can also be disarmed morally by a president who spreads false narratives about our history or who accepts, even if by his silence, our enemies’ lies about us.
She has a list.
It may be that President Obama is merely being discrete or currying favor. I think he actually believes what he says. I think it’s what he learned in school.
I was at Obama’s announcement that he was running for President and he had a line that irked me: a country can’t resolve another country’s civil war. It ignores the role of France in the American Revolution and while standing near hallowed ground of the house divided speech, it was oblivious to the singular importance of British and French intervention in the American Civil War, as one of the pre-conditions of Southern victory.
That said, I saw historian Michael Beschloss give a speech that had some clunkers on Lincoln, so I have to assume that either Beschloss didn’t know an area of history that was outside his specialty, or he believed that appealing to popular views of Lincoln is legitimate in popular oratory.