You Know Who Else Needed to Learn 'How to Be an American?' Dwight Eisenhower!

News item from earlier today:

A high-profile surrogate for Mitt Romney's campaign said Tuesday that he wished President Obama "would learn how to be an American" and argued he doesn't understand the U.S. economy because he spent his youth "smoking something."

Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu was talking to reporters on a conference call organized by the Romney campaign when he said, "I wish this president would learn how to be an American."

He made the jaw-dropping remark while criticizing Obama for arguing in Virginia on Friday that government investments in infrastructure and education have helped contribute to corporate profits, ABC News reported.

John Sununu made an interesting point, and it certainly got me to thinking. Like, you know who else should have learned "how to be an American"? Dwight Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States! Now there's somebody who didn't understand how this great nation worked.

I mean, think about. Check out this picture of Eisenhower when he was younger, "smoking something" -- probably in a foreign land...

Then Eisenhower spent several years honing his un-Americanism at the Ivy League's "Columbia boutique," where as president in the early 1950s he set the stage for the future schooling of his comrade-in-arms, Barack Hussein Obama.

He went straight from that pink-ivory tower on New York's Upper West Side to the White House, where he taxed the rich at a rate that would make today's European socialists blush -- 91 percent!

Do you know what Ike did with that money that he took from America's job creators? He built roads. Not just your old-fashioned Pony Express trails, but a massive, Soviet-style Interstate highway system. Eventually, the vast big-government ribbon of asphalt grew to an astonishing 47,182 miles. Eisenhower's lack of understanding of how America is supposed to work was staggering. Before 1956, hard-nosed entreprenuers were able to blaze their own free-market trail across God's earth with a machete, or a trusty axe. Now, you could only drive from New York to San Francisco on the precise path that Big Brother had mandated for you.

That wasn't the end of it. Two years later, after the Russkies had launched Sputnik into orbit, Eisenhower responded with his biggest Big Government power grab of all time. He rammed through the Orwellian-sounding National Defense Education Act, which called for centralized funding of better education in math, science and engineering. It would take decades for freedom-loving Americans to successfully re-direct those funds so our children could once again learn how dinosaurs and humans have shared the planet.

The fact that the American economy took off like an Apollo rocket during the 1950s, and that the era saw unprecedented expansion of a prosperous middle class, is a true tribute to the spirit and drive of everyday Americans. They found a way to succeed even as the man that political pundit Joseph Welch rightly pegged as a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy" sat in the Oval Office, attacking the rich and giving away "free stuff"... like roads.

There's one other way that Eisenhower brandished his un-Americanism in the face of America. When this great nation went to war, I understand that Ike spent most of the time over in Europe. He even spent the most important part of the war driving around France!

And you know who else drove around France during a war!