BUMBLING BOB GIBBS IS AT IT AGAIN.. LOL

Who is Dr Hanson and why should Gibbs care?

© 2009 WorldNetDaily

Robert Gibbs, the spokesman for President Barack Obama, today questioned who is Victor Davis Hanson and what does he know, when WND correspondent Les Kinsolving asked Gibbs about "mistakes" Hanson has pointed out in Obama's speeches.

Hanson, a nationally syndicated columnist and historian, wrote just one day earlier about "Our Historically Challenged President."

He noted Obama's reference during the presidential campaign to when his great-uncle "helped liberate Auschwitz, and that his grandfather knew fellow American troops that had entered Auschwitz and Treblinka."

"Both are impossible. The Americans didn't free either Nazi death camp," Hanson said.

Then came Obama's gaffe during his Victory Column speech in Berlin in 2008.

"He began, 'I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city.' He apparently forgot that for the prior eight years, the official faces of American foreign policy in Germany were Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice – both African-Americans," Hanson said.

Hanson continued, citing Obama's reference to the Berlin airlift, when the "world had come together to save Berlin."

Only, Hanson pointed out, the fact is that "it was almost an entirely American and British effort – written off by most observers as hopeless and joined only by a handful of Western allies."

Then in Cairo recently, Obama's historical allusions "were even more suspect."

"Almost every one of his references was either misleading or incomplete. He suggested that today's Middle East tension was fed by the legacy of European colonialism and the Cold War that had reduced nations to proxies," Hanson said. "But the great colonizers of the Middle East were the Ottoman Muslims, who for centuries ruled with an iron fist. The 20th-century movements of Baathism, Pan-Arabism and Nasserism – largely homegrown totalitarian ideologies – did far more damage over the last half-century to the Middle East than the legacy of European colonialism.

"Obama also claimed that 'Islam . . . carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment,'" In fact, Hanson wrote, medieval Islamic culture "had little to do with the European rediscovery of classical Greek and Latin values."

"Obama also insisted that 'Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition.' Yet the Spanish Inquisition began in 1478; by then Cordoba had long been re-conquered by Spanish Christians, and was governed as a staunchly Christian city," he said.

And to Obama's claim that it was "not violence" that ended slavery, Hanson mentioned the Civil War.

In today's news briefing, Kinsolving asked, "Historian Victor Davis Hanson cites what he terms, 'The president's politically correct canard that the Renaissance was fueled by Arab learning, and the president's statement that abolition of slavery and civil rights in the U.S. were accomplished without violence,' as two of seven presidential errors. Question: Does the White House believe Dr. Hanson is wrong? Or do you believe your speechwriters and the president made some mistakes?"

Said Gibbs, "Lester, I have to hand it to you that you have in only one question covered some five or six centuries of world history."

"No. No. Just mistakes … White House mistakes," said Kinsolving.

"Well I … Should I ask you a question and you respond, or should I give a…," Gibbs said.

"I'd be delighted anytime," Kinsolving said.

"At least you're not leading into where you think the answer to such a historically significant and important question," Gibbs said. "I'm not familiar with the work of the esteemed historian. I haven't seen it. I can assure you that not knowing who this historian is, I'll put my money on our speechwriters."

At the Washington Times, which publishes Hanson, editorial page editor Richard Miniter told Kinsolving: "To Mr. Gibbs: If you are in need of information about those in positions of higher learning, please write us."