It is so easy—and tempting—to dismantle Matthew Lynch’s  jaw-dropping essay on the Huffington Post titled “12 Reasons Why Obama Is One of the Best Presidents Ever” that it is unethical, like shooting fish in a barrel. Nearly everything about the post is snicker-worthy, beginning with its timing: this is the equivalent of writing a paean to JFK the morning after the Bay of Pigs.

I have no similar reticence about slamming the Huffington Post for running such an embarrassing screed. If it was intended as satire (and I still think this is a possibility), the piece is incompetent, because when satire is so close to reality that readers can’t tell it’s satire, then it becomes a hoax. There is a possibility, I suppose, that the editors published this because Lynch’s glossy-eyed, alternate reality ravings were entertainingly absurd (they are not: they are tragic), but this would be cruelty, the equivalent of Sean Hannity’s practice of allowing an ignorant, usually poor and uneducated liberal caller to make a fool of herself, slyly impugning the intelligence of the entire American Left. Yet the Huffington Post is largely Obama-friendly: his obeisant  media may finally be moving away from the President, but not that quickly. I think “12 Reasons…” was run because the editors believed the article had substantive merit, in which case, they should all be sent to the Home for Bewildered Editors. (It also may have been planted as link bait.)

If the post was run on its substance, then the editors failed their responsibilities in another respect: they didn’t check Lynch’s facts. His opinions and justifications for them may be Oz-worthy and his alone, but when he writes a flat-out misrepresentation like this…

“Obama’s very first executive action as President was to sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a bill specifically designed to annihilate wage discrimination barriers for women.”

….the editors are duty-bound to make him correct it. Obviously Lynch has no idea what the Lilly Ledbetter Act is; like the rest of his ode, this is just adopting Democratic propaganda. The Act is a narrow correction of the statute of limitations that blocked litigation in one well-publicized pay discrimination case, and that’s all it is. By no stretch of the imagination does it “annihilate wage discrimination barriers for women,” though similar nonsense was uttered during the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Come to think of it, Sean Hannity let one ignorant caller run on about Lilly Ledbedder too.

There is also the suspicion lurking in my mind that Lynch is a master hoaxter himself, and wrote this seemingly moronic celebration of President Obama’s administration to prove that a liberal mouthpiece like HuffPo would run anything if it came from a black supporter of the President, just to see how low the site’s  opinion was of the typical African American Obama fan.  If his essay is a spot-on parody of the blind Obama-worshiper, Lynch is a genius, but I had the same lurking suspicion at one time that Ed Wood was a satirical genius, and that Plan Nine From Outer Space [ this is the link to the entire movie, which, if you  haven’t seen it, you should, for it is a marvel] was intentional, masterful, camp. Alas, it was just crap (but still masterful) and Ed was a pathetic, deluded weirdo.

To say that Lynch’s essay has no substantive merit is not to say that it isn’t useful, for a better example of the ravages of confirmation bias I could not imagine. Confirmation bias, you may recall, is the damaging and wide-spread cognitive flaw whereby reality is automatically distorted into a form that supports our established beliefs. This malady, which afflicts us all to varying degrees, is one of the main reasons the world doesn’t work, and why ideologues view everything as supportive of their constructs, even evidence that would lead an objective observer to the opposite conclusion.

Lynch also demonstrates how inept leaders get elected. His 12 reasons consist of…

1. He is for The People.
2. He is for civil rights.
3. He is for one race -the human race.
4. He is for a healthcare system that brings hope and healing to the hurting.
5. He is for the middle class.
6. He is for women’s rights.
7. He is for doing away with pomp and circumstance.
8. He is for the environment.
9. He is for veterans.
10. He is for peace.
11. He is for education.
12. He is for entertaining the masses.

You know, Ed Wood was probably for all those things too, and he would have made Obama look like a great President by comparison. You don’t judge a leader by what he is “for,” but what he accomplishes. Lynch’s support for any of these contentions usually amounts to “he gave a great speech about it,” which is about the extent of Obama’s commitment to most of them as well. Lynch’s argument for why the President who illegally bombed Libya, has used drones to kill citizens of foreign countries (as well as our own) without due process of law and whose feckless policies are bringing the Middle East closer to conflagration is ” for peace” consists of citing the President’s embarrassing Nobel Peace Prize—that pretty much encapsulates the persuasiveness and rationality of his entire article.

See, it’s too easy: I’m not going to shoot down poor, deluded, confirmation bias-afflicted Michael’s whole sincere love letter to the leader for whom he has unconditional trust and regard. All of us, if we are fortunate, should have one such ally in life. The problem for the United States is that Barack Obama has millions of them.

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Pointer: Ablativemeatshield

Sources: Huffington Post