Thomas Sowell is a crank

Many conservatives consider Thomas Sowell a brilliant guy, and maybe that's true -- in an "A Beautiful Mind" sort of way -- but he's also a crank.  Here is an example:

A quadrupling of the national debt in just one year and accepting a nuclear-armed sponsor of international terrorism such as Iran are not things from which any country is guaranteed to recover. 

Just two nuclear bombs were enough to get Japan to surrender in World War II. It is hard to believe that it would take much more than that for the United States of America to surrender — especially with people in control of both the White House and the Congress who were for turning tail and running in Iraq just a couple of years ago.

Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under sharia law.

The glib pieties in Barack Obama’s televised sermonettes will not stop Iran from becoming a nuclear terrorist nation. Time is running out fast and we will be lucky if it doesn’t happen during the first term of this president. If he gets elected to a second term  — which is quite possible, despite whatever economic disasters he leads us into — our fate as a nation may be sealed.

First a little cleanup on "quadrupling of the national debt in just one year."  When George Bush left office the national debt stood at approximately $10 trillion.  To quadruple that "in just one year" we'd have to run a deficit of $30 trillion in fiscal 2009.  This is not the sort of goofy claim one would expect of a brilliant economist. 

But it's the hyperventiliating about Iran that really caught my eye.  If Iran develops a nuclear bomb or two, Sowell claims, it will blow up a US city or two.  That seems nutty to me, but the really nutty part is Sowell's belief that this would cause us to surrender to Iran and live under Sharia law.  If Obama gets a second term, he warns, our daughters will have to wear burkas.

And he knows this is true because lots of us thought it was a bad idea to keep fighting a disastrous war in Iraq.  I mean, if you don't think we should invade and occupy countries that don't pose any serious threat to us, then obviously you'd let Iran take over the United States.  Right?

Apparently Thomas Sowell thinks "Red Dawn" is a documentary.