And instantly, the Web is awash with Rutherford B. Hayes experts. If you didn't know better, you'd now be believing that Hayes was such a technogeek that he had an iPad on his desk and an iPod in his pocket.
Ironically, the presidential precedent for telling the same bogus Hayes story was set by another president a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. In 1985 Ronald Reagan was making a self-deprecating joke, poking fun at his age, recalling that President Rutherford B. Hayes once was “shown a recently invented device.”
“That's an amazing invention,” he said. “But who would ever want to use one of them?” He was talking about a telephone. I thought at the time that he might be mistaken.”
That's the same Reagan who once said, “80 percent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation,” so clearly presidents can get their facts wrong.
At least Obama qualified his "common knowledge" facts with "reportedly said". The apparently incorrect quote, like many others, can be found in many places around the net:
Rutherford B. Hayes quotes.
That doesn't discount the fact that whoever is writing Obama's speeches should have used the low-tech telephone to call an historian, rather than use the high-tech Google, to gather facts for a speech. <snort>
In a related story, three days ago Encyclopaedia Britannica announced that it is going out of print and will instead change with the times by focusing on its digital encyclopedia. Today, most technology users value connectivity and experience over factual accuracy. Newspapers and magazines are in decline, bloggers and content aggregators are on the rise. The common knowledge of Crowd-sourcing has replaced the experts. The problem with crowd-sourcing the answer to any particular question is, of course, that you're as likely to find ideologically driven opinion as hard fact. You also have little in the way of support for judgments about credibility, reliability, and accuracy. It's a brave new world where the idiots en masse have become the experts.
Here is Obama falsely criticizing a former president while his own energy policy is a total failure because of an unwillingness to allow for exploration and drilling for oil. He is the one who is being backwards.
