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May 20, 2008
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:
 | 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. |
| 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." |
| 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." |
| 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? |
| 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."
| 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. |
"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.
| 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. |
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 Brimelow’s review. Click
here for Michelle Malkin's website.
Michelle Malkin's latest book is "Unhinged:
Exposing Liberals Gone Wild."
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