President recites Flat Earth myth

Clayton Cramer explains:

Obama gives a speech where he criticizes Republican opposition to his green bankruptcy program, and says:

Those same people, Obama said, would’ve thought the Earth was flat, that television wouldn’t last, that the automobile was only a passing fad.

“If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society,” he said. “They would not have believed that the world was round.”

Now, if you attended high school, or college, you would know (or should know) that there was no educated European who thought the Earth was flat. None. The dispute that made it hard for Columbus to get funding was that insisted the Earth was 18,000 miles in circumference, so the Indies were a plausible voyage west from Spain. The experts who told the various governments of Europe that Columbus wasn't going to be successful thought the Earth was closer to 25,000 miles around -- and sailing west to the Indies was going to be a failure. Had there not been the Americas in the way, Columbus and crew would have died of thirst.

The flat Earth myth is also explained by NASA and Wikipedia. I have also made the point several times on this blog, such as here. The Flat Earth Myth is a creation of evolutionists who were trying to make fun of Christians.

It is distressing to hear an American president say something so stupid. These were prepared remarks, so it appears that Pres. Obama and his advisors have some basic misunderstandings about the Earth. Columbus sailed from Spain to some islands near Florida. He did not sail around the Earth. He merely crossed the Atlantic ocean.

Update: The same speech got another historical fact completely wrong:

There always have been folks who are the naysayers and don't believe in the future, and don't believe in trying to do things differently. One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, ‘It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?’ That's why he's not on Mount Rushmore because he’s looking backwards. He’s not looking forwards. He’s explaining why we can't do something, instead of why we can do something.

The Wash. Post fact checker gives Obama its worst Pinocchio whopper rating:

According to Ari Hoogenboom, who wrote the definite biography, “Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President,” Hayes entertained Thomas A. Edison at the White House. Edison demonstrated the phonograph for the president. “He was hardly hostile to new inventions,” Hoogenboom said.

Hayes, in fact, was such a technology buff that he installed the first telephone in the White House. A list of telephone subscribers published in the article “The Telephones Comes to Washington,” by Richard T. Loomis, shows that the White House was given the number “1.”