But Obama graduated from Harvard! With honors!

One of the barroom arguments that I most often encounter goes something like this.... "If Barack Obama is a totally incompetent idiot, how did he manage to graduate with honors from Harvard?"

As it turns out, graduating with honors from Harvard isn't particularly difficult. 

Here's something from CNN:

In case anyone had a shadow of a doubt that most Harvard students are precocious, smart, if not learned, we hear from the lips of Harvard's Dean of Undergraduate Education, Jay M. Harris, that nearly all the students at Harvard are indeed above average -- so much so that the median grade given is an A- and the most frequent grade awarded is an A!

This is enough to put Barack into Lake Wobegon territory - "where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all of the children are above average". 

But that doesn't mean it's easy to graduate with freakin' honors, does it?  Surely they don't hand out summa, magna, magma, omega and beta cum laude degrees as if they were Obamacare Exemptions? 

They do.  They do.  And it's been going on for a long time.  Here's something from The Boston Globe via SFGate (San Francisco):

Last June, a record 91 percent of Harvard students graduated summa, magna, or cum laude, far more than at Yale (51 percent), Princeton (44 percent) and other elite universities, a Globe study has found.
While the world regards these students as the best of the best of America's 13 million undergraduates, Harvard honors has actually become the laughingstock of the Ivy League.

That was written in 2001, BTW. 

Everything else about Barry's education is old news.  We don't know how he did at Occidental or at Columbia because he won't release his grades.  (You can go here if you want to learn about the academic performance of John Kerry, Joe Biden, The Goracle or George W. Bush.) 

Here's one thing we do know about grades and getting into Harvard.
I graduated from Delta State University with a 3.33.  
That wasn't good enough to get me into Harvard, but it was pretty damn good. 
If my undergrad record was good enough to justify admission to the Ivy League, you would read about it on this website once a week. 
I would scan my transcript and post it.  Look at my grades, dammit! 

Barack Obama's grades weren't good enough to get him into Harvard.  I know this, you know this, and he knows this.  He was an Affirmative Action student.  That's why he hasn't released the records.

Barack Obama's accomplishments weren't enough to get him elected president.  He was the recipient of Affirmative Action votes. 

Barack Obama's record as president has been horrible.  He's been blessed with an Affirmative Action media who believe their job is to shower his path with rose petals. 

It's the only treatment he's ever known. 

But he graduated from Harvard!  With honors!