Well, KABOOM! That made my head explode. It never occurred to me, I don’t know why, that we had non-senile elected officials (when Joe Biden was asked the same question, he reportedly answered, “Coffee”) who don’t know the basic history of the nation they are supposed to lead and worse, don’t see that as a problem.
I know that I am a bit obsessed with Presidential history (but my knowledge of it helps me figure out what is either going on or should be going on almost every day). I’m reasonable, though; I believe that a citizen is at least minimally informed if he or she can identify the significance and place in the U.S. timeline of just five POTUSes: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson (the Louisiana Purchase), Honest Abe (the Civil War), Woodrow Wilson (The Great War) and FDR (The Great Depression and World War II). Knowing those five isn’t enough to qualify such a citizen as sufficiently educated or civically literate, but it is a fair baseline that suggests they know something about the unique country in which they live.
However, for a member of Congress to lack even that much perspective and context and still presume to make laws and propose policy is unconscionable and disqualifying, for two reasons. First, it means such a member—okay, let’s call a Chu a Chu—doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and second, it means she lacks the requisite sense of responsibility and intellectual curiosity to know what she doesn’t know and know why she should know it.
In the case of Chu, her ignorance is bewildering. She graduated from high school, has a college degree (majoring in mathematics), and has Ph.D. degree in psychology. She taught psychology in the Los Angeles Community College District for 20 years. The fact that she never heard of Woodrow Wilson (the second Worst President Ever) or at least doesn’t know beans about him is an indictment of the U.S. Congress and the nation’s educational system.
And, of course, Rep. Chu herself. You have to pass an exam to be a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant, a hairdresser, but we let civically ignorant people run for Congress so civically ignorant citizens can elect them and we all end up with incompetents. I am guessing that a mandatory civics and history literacy test to qualify someone to run for public office would be ruled unconstitutional, but a state could offer a voluntary test. Newt Gingrich types would ace it, and Rep. Chu-types would refuse to take it, giving all a strong indication of their limitations.
You know. Morons.
Some additional thoughts:
1. Defenders of Chu are attacking Bessent for asking the question, arguing that Woodrow Wilson has nothing to do with the Iran War. I agree it was a smart-aleck “gotcha” question, but any half-educated member of Congress should have been able to answer it, and the fact that Chu could not “is what it is,” and what it is is horrifying.
2. Give Chu credit for answering the question, though that may mean that she isn’t even cognizant of how badly her ignorance reflects on her. “Hey, so I don’t know the history of the nation I serve in Congress! What’s the big deal?”
3. Chu’s rendition of “Don’t Know Much About History” pushed out of first place the second most ignorant question from a member of Congress this week. During yesterday’s House Homeland Security Committee hearing, Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) accused Secretary Mullin of heading a racist agency, saying, “You know what’s racist? The fact that every detainee in Delaney Hall is a person of color.”
Somebody tell her…
Ethics Alarms 
Welp…bet she could tell you why Black Lives Matter, that George Floyd is a transitional hero, and that the 1619 Project is irreproachably sacrosanct.
PWS
I don’t know… That’s not actually a civics question, it’s historical trivia. And sure, some familiarity with history is probably good, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it necessary, especially when the question is completely tangential to the topic at hand…. Can anyone say what would have changed if she’d answered the question correctly? Would it have clarified something Bessent was supposed to answer? Can anyone say how the knowledge of Wilson’s name would have changed the way Chu asked her questions?
I’m particularly apathetic to this in the face of Jewish Space Lasers, the possibility of Guam capsizing, women being able to reject rapist’s sperm, whether the Mars rover could take a picture of the Armstrong’s flag, or literally anything that Maisie Hirono has ever said… Chu isn’t necessarily an idiot, she just doesn’t know who the president was during WWI. I have the feeling Trump, alongside the lion’s share of congress wouldn’t have before this either.
I honestly think the people saying what Bessent did was wrong had the better of it. He was there to answer questions, not quiz the representative. We shouldn’t let people normalize holding a Trivia session to filibuster time like that.
Why not? Is this so different than a witness answering a question with a total non sequitur? If you ask someone why are eggs so expensive, and he or she answers that the unemployment rate among chicken farmers is going down. Stuff such as that happens a lot.
Or why are congressmen allowed to make a 4:50 speech on something unrelated to the hearing or the witness and then ask some dumb throwaway question at the end?
Actually the why is that there are cameras at every hearing. If the hearings were not televised, they might get some serious questions and germane answers instead of every day a circus.
It’s not that I disagree with you, in fact, I think I’m in complete agreement, I just don’t think we should be encouraging that. Maybe these hearings should be in camera, or maybe only to a live audience. I don’t know… I do know that these proceedings are important, and they’re being treated very casually.
What was Bessent driving at? Wilson was a Democrat? There was a recession during WWI? There was inflation during WWI? Wilson didn’t get Congressional authority to enter the country into WWI? Anyone?
I’d love to see the whole exchange.
They highlight the question, then rewind to the beginning of the exchange, which includes the question again.
…. really? You want to make that argument? That attacking Iran is somehow a parallel to The Great War? Defend that. In what way? If Chu had known Wilson’s name, what was the likely follow-up?
But it’s not trivia, HT, unless you regard all history as trivia. (As a Canadian, you have a valid argument that Wilson is trivia to you. The Great War had a different effect on Canada, but a crucial one, as you know.) If an American doesn’t know about Wilson, I assume he or she doesn’t grasp the culture and development of American politics and culture. Wilson let corporate interests pull him into a useless war. He is responsible for extending Jim Crow. He spread the Spanish flu world wide. His foolish diplomacy during the Versailles peace negotiations led directly to WWII. He trampled on Constitutional rights to crush dissent during the war. His disability is an abject lesson in the need for transparency in the Executive Branch. The Democrats, who captured the history field in the Fifties, deliberately whitewashed Wilson as part of their propaganda campaign. If an American doesn’t understand the period from 1914-1918, he or she doesn’t understand the country: the Wilson years carry more cautionary tales than any administration, and The Great War’s effect on American culture and society was profound.
This might be unsurprising, but I disagree.
You might balk at calling it trivia, but of course it is. It certainly isn’t civics… You actually went hard enough there that I questioned my understanding of the definition and checked.
I think you have a bias here, where you vastly overvalue specific knowledge of historical trivia. We probably agree that a familiarity with history is beneficial, particularly if you want to avoid pitfalls. But those historical lessons don’t stop at your countries border… Should we take no lessons from Greece? Venezuela? Cuba? Haiti? China? All these cautionary tales the world over… Do you know the leadership of each while they were taking on the roll of crash-test-dummy for the rest of the world? Do you know their other policies? Whether they were effective leaders? Whether they cheated on their wife? What about your own history, traced back to Europe? How familiar are you with the War of The Roses? No, It’s important to know the shape of history, but the details are often unimportant.
In this case, Was it important that the President in WW I was Wilson? Was it important that he was a Democrat? Was Jim Crow relevant? No… No… No… Was it important that Americans entered WW I even though they hadn’t been attacked? Getting warmer, but probably still not a good answer to the question she was asking…. Which I actually think was good: When can Americans expect the prices to go down? When is Trump going to do the thing he promised to do? And to point out that yet again – He lied.
I made the point elsewhere… Trump and Bessent saying that the increased prices were only going to last 50 days were a lie. It’s the exact same kind of lie that Biden and Fauci said when they were talking about how long lockdowns were going to have to last, or what percentage of the population would need vaccination to arrive at herd immunity… Fauci was stupid and arrogant enough to say it out loud after: People weren’t going to accept the truth, so he lied, and frog boiled people.
It’s times like this that I wish WordPress had edit buttons. The red squiggly line has failed me.
country’s, WWI, was….
You and I both, HT.
Now if I were even more of an asshole than I am, I’d make a big deal over you typing WW II when you meant WW I. But I know a typo when I see one. So I’m fixing that…
And yes, my belief in the importance of Presidential history could fairly be called a bias.
I don’t think Bessent’s question was tangential to the topic. Chu was asking, by implication, – or at least that is what I inferred from her line of questioning – why should we spend money to attack a nation that had not attacked us. Bessent’s point was responding to her implication. I am no history buff but I know Wilson campaigned on being an isolationist but then later changed his tune and got involved in defeating the Kaiser.
Trump’ detractors are saying he said he was the no forever war president but then lied to them by bombing Iran to rid it of a defense capability that would protect their nuclear weapons program. What those people don’t understand is that adversaries don’t say well ok we will be peaceful and not try to eliminate you from the planet when we say we are isolationist. I always laugh at those that the US has a foreign policy of neo-colonialism when they ignore the global intifada or China’s push into Africa and South America.
There is little difference between April 1917 with respect to German ambitions and today with the ambitions of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or many of the governments that wish to rule the planet.
Yes, that makes sense now, except that attacking Iran was a lot more justifiable for the US joining the French and British (and Canada) in fighting Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Lusitania sinking by a German U-boat (maybe) which took about 1200 lives killed 128 Americans, and Wilson used those death as a pretext for entering The Great War, aka WWI. Since the then-new radical regime in Iran held the US staff of the American consulate in Tehran hostage in 1979, an act of war, Iran and its network of proxy militias have been responsible for the deaths of over 1,000 American soldiers and civilians. And Germany wasn’t trying to get a nuclear bomb in 1915.
I’m sorry Chris, but here’s the exchange:
Ignore the first 30 seconds, they picked out the question and then gave the context, which included the question.
What she was asking was when the President’s promises of relief are going to materialize. He’s the one that promised that these tariffs were going to create jobs. He’s the one that promised food prices would decrease. He’s the one that said help was on the way for fuel price relief.
On the question of “was he wrong when he said Americans would only face 50 days of elevated pricing, seeing as we’re at 100 days now.” He pointed out that prices are 7% down from the peak. Which is great and all, except prices increased by 50%. So the short answer is “Yes, I was wrong” If you want to get into some kind of explanation of why that happened, or why it was necessary to do what we’re doing… Sure. But this is the kind of communication that could happen up front. One of the many differences between a good leader and a bad is the ability to properly manage expectations. No one, literally no one, who knew anything about anything thought that prices would return to normal in 50 days.
Trump lied to you. Bessent lied to you. This is functionally indistinguishable from when Fauci lied about the lockdowns, and what would be necessary to combat Covid: He thought you were too stupid or belligerent to accept the truth, so he lied to you to buy himself a little time.