[BretLudwig]

Barack Obama: Gaffe Machine

By Michelle Malkin

"All it takes is one gaffe to taint a Republican for life. The
political
establishment never let Dan Quayle live down his fateful misspelling of
"potatoe." The New York Times distorted and misreported the first
President Bush's questions about new scanner technology at a grocers'
convention to brand him permanently as out of touch.

But what about Barack Obama? The guy's a perpetual gaffe machine. Let us
count the ways, large and small, that his tongue has betrayed him
throughout the campaign:
bullet Last May, he claimed that tornadoes in Kansas killed a whopping
10,000 people: "In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in
Kansas. Ten thousand people died€”an entire town destroyed." The actual
death toll: 12.

bullet Earlier this month in Oregon, he redrew the map of the United
States: "Over the last 15 months, we've traveled to every corner of the
United States. I've now been in 57 states? I think one left to go."

bullet Last week, in front of a roaring Sioux Falls, S.D., audience,
Obama
exulted: "Thank you, Sioux City. ... I said it wrong. I've been in Iowa
for
too long. I'm sorry."

bullet Explaining last week why he was trailing Hillary Clinton in
Kentucky, Obama again botched basic geography: "Sen. Clinton, I think, is
much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it's not
surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in
the
middle." On what map is Arkansas closer to Kentucky than Illinois?

bullet Obama has as much trouble with numbers as he has with maps. Last
March, on the anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Ala., he
claimed his parents united as a direct result of the civil rights
movement:

"There was something stirring across the country because of what happened
in Selma, Ala., because some folks are willing to march across a bridge.
So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born."

Obama was born in 1961. The Selma march took place in 1965. His
spokesman,
Bill Burton, later explained that Obama was "speaking metaphorically
about
the civil rights movement as a whole."
bullet Earlier this month in Cape Girardeau, Mo., Obama showed off his
knowledge of the war in Afghanistan by homing in on a lack of
translators:
"We only have a certain number of them, and if they are all in Iraq, then
it's harder for us to use them in Afghanistan." The real reason it's
"harder for us to use them" in Afghanistan: Iraqis speak Arabic or
Kurdish. The Afghanis speak Pashto, Farsi or other non-Arabic languages.

bullet Over the weekend in Oregon, Obama pleaded ignorance of the
decades-old, multi-billion-dollar massive Hanford nuclear waste cleanup:

"Here's something that you will rarely hear from a politician, and that
is
that I'm not familiar with the Hanford, uuuuhh, site, so I don't know
exactly what's going on there. (Applause.) Now, having said that, I
promise you I'll learn about it by the time I leave here on the ride back
to the airport."

I assume on that ride, a staffer reminded him that he's voted on at least
one defense authorization bill that addressed the "costs, schedules, and
technical issues" dealing with the nation's most contaminated nuclear
waste site.
bullet Last March, the Chicago Tribune reported this little-noticed
nugget
about a fake autobiographical detail in Obama's "Dreams from My Father":

"Then, there's the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his
racial
awakening at age 9. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying
photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by
his efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, the Life article and the
photographs don't exist, say the magazine's own historians.

bullet And in perhaps the most seriously troubling set of gaffes of them
all, Obama told a Portland crowd over the weekend that Iran doesn't "pose
a serious threat to us"€”cluelessly arguing that "tiny countries" with
small defense budgets can't do us harm€”and then promptly flip-flopped
the next day, claiming, "I've made it clear for years that the threat
from
Iran is grave."

Barack Obama€”promoted by the Left and the media as an all-knowing,
articulate, transcendent Messiah€”is a walking, talking gaffe machine.
How many more passes does he get? How many more can we afford?"

Michelle Malkin [email her] is author of Invasion: How America Still
Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores.
Click here for Peter Brimelows review. Click here for Michelle
Malkin's
website. Michelle Malkin's latest book is "Unhinged: Exposing Liberals
Gone
Wild."

http://www.vdare.com/malkin/080520_obama.htm

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