Obama The Gaffe Master

Barack Obama has made so many gaffes on the campaign trail that it's sort of become a habit for him. Take a look at the ever-lengthening list, from various sources:

Arabic languages and correct help

Sporting a shiny new American flag pin at an appearance in Rush Limbaugh's hometown, Sen. Barack Obama came up with some novel reasons why the U.S. may be struggling in the war in Afghanistan.

"We don't have enough capacity right now to deal with it -- and it's not just the troops," Obama, D-Ill., told a crowd in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

Obama posited -- incorrectly -- that Arabic translators deployed in Iraq are needed in Afghanistan -- forgetting, momentarily, that Afghans don't speak Arabic.

"We only have a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then its harder for us to use them in Afghanistan," Obama said.

The vast majority of military translators in both war zones are drawn from the local population. Naturally they speak the local language. In Iraq, that's Arabic or Kurdish. In Afghanistan, it's any of a half dozen other languages -- including Pashtu, Dari, and Farsi.

No sooner did Obama realize his mistake -- and correct himself -- but he immediately made another.

"We need agricultural specialists in Afghanistan, people who can help them develop other crops than heroin poppies, because the drug trade in Afghanistan is what is driving and financing these terrorist networks. So we need agricultural specialists," he said.

So far, so good.

"But if we are sending them to Baghdad, they're not in Afghanistan," Obama said.

Iraq has many problems, but encouraging farmers to grow food instead of opium poppies isn't one of them. In Iraq, oil fields not poppy fields are a major source of U.S. technical assistance.

How many states?!

Amazingly, Barack Obama claims to have visited 57 states! I'm going to be generous and chalk this gaffe up to exhaustion, because it is difficult for me to fathom that someone who wants to be the President of the United States could actually be this stupid. Watch the video.

I will give Obama the benefit of the doubt on this, and you can bet the media will give it a complete pass. Marc Ambinder reminds us that the media wouldn't do the same if this had been McCain.

He'll MAKE you better...

[In response to a recent TV ad,] Obama said Republicans were welcome to pick on him and his track record, but not his wife.

“If they think that they’re going to try to make Michelle an issue in this campaign, they should be careful because that I find unacceptable. The notion that you start attacking my wife, or my family ... is just low class. ... Lay off my wife, all right?”

Love that. You could almost hear those bowling pins toppling as Obama’s testosterone surged, while Michelle was almost Nancy Reaganesque sitting by his side. Of course, Michelle Obama is manifestly capable of defending herself, but it’s refreshing to see a man come to his damsel’s defense.

Even so, hard-core feminists who switched allegiances from Hillary Clinton to Obama must have had to Botox their faces to keep their eyes from rolling out of their sockets upon hearing “lay off my wife.”

They were already in fetal recoil from Obama’s earlier “sweetie,” offered to a female reporter at a campaign stop in Detroit. When ABC’s Peggy Agar asked him a question about how he was going to help the American autoworkers, Obama responded: “Hold on one second, sweetie. We’ll do a press avail.”

Alas, Obama felt it necessary to apologize a few hours later, leaving a message on Agar’s voicemail.

Both husband and wife have made plenty of remarks that were not mere nits, but are troubling hints at a future where government knows what’s best. Such as this from a Los Angeles rally where Michelle pronounced that Obama “will require you to work.”

“He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism ... that you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

Require? Demand? What if we like being alone in our comfort zones?

Or this from Obama in Roseburg, Ore., last Saturday: “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say O.K. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.”

We can’t?! It’s not?

By all means, let’s roll out the hybrids and hold the fries, but are other countries now the judges of American lifestyles? Perhaps while human-rights investigator Doudou Diene is in the United States the next few weeks probing racism for the United Nations, he can take a measure of American gluttony. What would Senegal have us do?

What city is he in again??

At first, it seemed as if Barack Obama might just be speaking figuratively, as is his wont sometimes. "How's it going, Sunshine? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everybody. It's good to be in Sunshine!" Obama declared on taking the stage this afternoon for a rally at the BankAtlantic Arena in Broward County, Fla., just west of Ft. Lauderdale.

Obama, who often comments admiringly on the climate and regional aura of his various destinations, may simply have been evoking the warmth of the Sunshine State, which he campaigned in for the first time this week after staying away for months to observe the Democratic Party's primary ban against the state. Or perhaps it was a term of endearment, similar to his recent (and later regretted) use of "sweetie" in speaking to a woman reporter.

But then he said it again, and again -- "When we are unified sunshine, nobody can stop us!" -- and it became clear: Obama thought he was in Sunshine, Fla. But he was not. He was in Sunrise, the name given to this particular swath of South Florida palm trees, bungalows and outlet stores.

Ignorance and Kerry-like flip-flopping on Latin America...

On Friday Barack Obama spelled out his Latin America policy [snip]:

Since the Bush Administration launched a misguided war in Iraq, its policy in the Americas has been negligent toward our friends, ineffective with our adversaries, disinterested in the challenges that matter in peoples' lives, and incapable of advancing our interests in the region.

No wonder, then, that demagogues like Hugo Chavez have stepped into this vacuum.

This is pathetic. Hugo Chavez came to power during the Clinton Administration, and was first elected President of Venezuela in 1998, two years before the Bush Administration took office.

Then...

On Thursday Obama told the Orlando Sentinel that he would meet with Chavez and "one of the obvious high priorities in my talks with President Hugo Chavez would be the fermentation of anti-American sentiment in Latin America, his support of FARC in Colombia and other issues he would want to talk about."

But then on Friday he said any government supporting FARC should be isolated.

"We will shine a light on any support for the FARC that comes from neighboring governments," he said in a speech in Miami. "This behavior must be exposed to international condemnation, regional isolation, and - if need be - strong sanctions. It must not stand."

So he will meet with the leader of a country he simultaneously says should be isolated? Huh?

Meeting with rogue dictators...

When the House of Representatives takes up arms against $4 gas by voting 324-84 to sue OPEC, you know that election-year discourse has gone surreal. Another unmistakable sign is when a presidential candidate makes a gaffe, then, realizing it is too egregious to take back without suffering humiliation, decides to make it a centerpiece of his foreign policy.

Before the Democratic debate of July 23, Barack Obama had never expounded upon the wisdom of meeting, without precondition, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong Il or the Castro brothers. But in that debate, he was asked about doing exactly that. Unprepared, he said sure -- then got fancy, declaring the Bush administration's refusal to do so not just "ridiculous" but "a disgrace."

After that, there was no going back. So he doubled down. What started as a gaffe became policy. By now, it has become doctrine. Yet it remains today what it was on the day he blurted it out: an absurdity.

Having lashed himself to the ridiculous, unprecedented promise of unconditional presidential negotiations -- and then having compounded the problem by elevating it to a principle -- Obama keeps trying to explain. On Sunday, he declared in Pendleton, Ore., that by Soviet standards Iran and others "don't pose a serious threat to us." (On the contrary. Islamic Iran is dangerously apocalyptic. Soviet Russia was not.) The next day in Billings, Mont.: "I've made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave."

That's the very next day, mind you.

It was just a few months ago that I believed McCain had zero chance against Barack Obama. Now, however, I truly believe that Barack Obama would be McCain's best bet. He has repeatedly demonstrated himself to be not only ignorant of facts, but also quite willing to make up policy on the fly. This guy has no track record to speak of, and no stunning intellect to rely upon. He has no experience, no substance, and no true ability to deliver on ANY of the promises he has made. McCain should be salivating at the thought of facing Obama in the general election!

It has abundantly clear that Barack Obama's supporters support him not because of his platform, positions, or abilities, but for the simple fact that they want to see a black man in the White House. It's their turn.

That may be a controversial thing to say, but I challenge any Obama supporter to come up with any of the following:
1. one significant piece of Senate legislation sponsored by Obama
2. one major accomplishment from the Illinois Senate
3. one example of Obama reaching out and achieving a bipartisan solution

If you can come up with one, I'll gladly post it. I'm not holding my breath. On a side note, if you talk with any Obama supporters, ask them to give you one of these three. I'll bet you they can't do even one, much less all three.

Obama supporters are no longer supporters - they're followers. They will follow him no matter what idiot thing he says, no matter what blindingly obvious mistake he makes, no matter how stupid he makes himself look, no matter what his policies will do to this country. They simply believe in his vacant change/hope mantra.

It's a dangerous combination.

There's my two cents.