This might be one of the funniest and most depressing things I’ve heard in quite some time.

Michael Savage uses Plato’s Republic to criticize Obama for his failure to be an ideal “guardian” of our political community. Obama, he says, isn’t dedicated to maintaining freedom in the United States, which Plato says should be his principle task.

Among other things, he has “seized power,” “appointed Marxist czars,” “kowtowed to foreign dictators,” and “conducted hostile takeovers of whole industries.”

Listen for yourselves, really, because it’s a gem of a little speech.

In addition to the weird list of things that Obama has apparently done to destroy our freedom, two points are worth mentioning: first, Savage makes very, very clear that he doesn’t want his listeners to think that reading Plato makes him smart. After all, he says, he read the Republic in high school, not college, and his high school was full of regular people, not especially wealthy or smart people. And he promises that he never re-read the Republic.

And secondly, Savage clearly is telling the truth about the fact that he didn’t re-read. Indeed, his understanding of the Republic is certainly at the high school level … or lower. After all, the straightforward reading of the ideal city in speech in the Republic, which Savage quotes from so appovingly, is quite clearly proto-fascist.

If he kept reading with the same sort of approval, he’d also tell his listeners about how in Socrates’ ideal city, the education of the warrior class would be heavily censored; the rulers would institute a complex eugenics program and would back it up with a “noble lie” about blood and soil; women and children would be held in common; and, of course, in Socrates’ description of the descending regime types, democracy is clearly rated the second-to-worst.

A lot of people listen to Michael Savage and they probably all felt like they learned something about philosophy from him during this short rant about Plato, Obama, high school education in America, and the purity of drinking water. But, of course, like every single episode of his show, they actually learned nothing at all. Or, what is so much worse, they learned incorrect information and now believe they know something.

Savage is precisely the sort of person who would have been publicly humiliated by Socrates in the agora: he is perfectly ignorant of his own ignorance and he attempts to foist upon others the appearance of wisdom.

HT: James Pauley.