Obama's A Gaffe Riot
Posted May 28th, 2008 by Da King
I've been ignoring Barack Obama's growing list of mistakes and blunders, but they have been coming so fast and furious that I have to comment (okay, I don't HAVE to. I WANT to). I've already reported some of them, such as Obama referring to Iran as a tiny country that is little threat to the U.S., only to claim a few days later that Iran is a grave threat, so I don't have to repeat that one. Oops, too late.
Here goes.
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Barry O's latest blunder was during his Memorial Day speech, when he confused Memorial Day, when we honor our fallen soldiers, with Veterans Day, when we honor our living veterans. Or, Barry sees dead people. You decide:
"On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today — our sense of patriotism is particularly strong." - Barack Obama, May 26, 2008
O's campaign spokesman Bill Burton reinforced the error in a retort to John McCain, when Burton said “Memorial Day is a day to honor our nation’s veterans, not a day for political posturing.” Ironically, Obama took several swipes at George W. Bush ON MEMORIAL DAY, which evidently were somehow NOT "political posturing." I guess I just don't understand the rules.
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Last saturday, Obama, on a campaign stop in SUNRISE, Florida, said, ""How's it going, SUNSHINE? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everybody. It's good to be in SUNSHINE!"
Maybe there weren't any clouds that day.
This gaffe is reminiscent of Obama's greeting to Sioux Falls, S.D., where he declared, "Thank you, Sioux City!"
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Last thursday, Obama told the Orlando Sentinel that he would meet with Venezuelan president Hugo 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.”
Later, Obama said, "We have to hold Venezuela accountable if, in fact, it is trying to FERMENT terrorist activities in other borders. If Venezuela has violated those rules, we should mobilize all the countries to sanction Venezuela and let them know that that’s not acceptable behavior.”
Shades of Dan Quayle. The word is "FOMENT" Mr. Potato-head, not "FERMENT". Not to mention that everybody already knows Chavez has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to FARC. Everybody except Barry, that is. Wake up, Obamabots. Time to arise from your sleep. Somebody fetch the holy water.
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Earlier in May 2008, Obama showed off his vast knowledge of the country he intends to lead, by declaring, “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.”
Wow. This guy is so smart, he has created 8 states that the rest of us don't even know about yet. Impressive.
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Last May, Obama intoned, “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.
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In another impressive display of his knowledge of geography, Obama explained why Hillary Clinton was leading in the Kentucky primary: “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.”
Those states in the middle.
On what map is Arkansas closer to Kentucky than Illinois? Is it the one with 57 or 58 states, rather than the customary 50 ? For the record, Kentucky BORDERS Illinois, which you'd think Barry would know, seeing as how Illinois is his home state.
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It isn't only maps that confuse Barry O. It's dates too. Last March, on the anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Alabama, he claimed his parents conceived him as a result of the march.
“There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, 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. Unless Barry was born 4 years before his own conception, he was telling a whopper.
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Speaking about a lack of translators in Afghanistan, the Obamanation pointed out, "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.”
Right. Or it could be because Iraqis and Afghanis speak different languages. The Iraqis speak Arabic or Kurdish, while Afghanis speak Pashto, Farsi, or non-Arabic languages.
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There are several more Obama gaffes. Some can be found at Michelle Malkin's website here.
And to think, all Dan Quayle did was misspell the word "potato".
May 28th, 2008 at 6:44 am
He also claimed recently that his great uncle helped liberate Aushwitz—Russia liberated Aushwitz, not America.
The campaign also made a big deal about Hill's comment referring to Bobby Kennedy and a primary in June, as in, not that unusual in our nation's history—the campaign and supporters are sensationalising and exploiting the heck out of this comment to mean something it was not intended to mean—how grasping, distorting and immature is that? So Jerry Springerish—VERY.
The more I learn about the big O, the less impressed I become—I'd rather not vote than vote for a poser (pretending to be something he is not).
May 28th, 2008 at 8:28 am
He's scatter brained. It may result from an unsure sense of personal identity.
May 28th, 2008 at 8:38 am
My, how the tables have turned. The liberal media had a field day when McCain mixed up the Sunni and Shiite factions and distorted his 100 year war quote, but little did they know………………..Osama would eventually bring much more entertainment to the table.
If this is how he acts under no pressure, I cannot wait till he's pressed hard in head-head debates. Once the lies start flowing this easily, turning them off seems to pose the greatest challenge. Hopefully, the die-hard sheep can still recognize tall-tale telling when it's this bad.
Which liar is the biggest liability? This is for the super-delegates to decide.
May 28th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Elijah,
I thought it was disgraceful how the media distorted Hillary's RFK comment too. She didn't mean it the way it was taken. Even RFK Jr didn't take it the wrong way, but the Obama-ites jumped all over it.
About that Obama Auschwitz comment - now Obama's people are saying it was his great uncle (not his uncle as Obama said), and it was Buchenwald (not Auschwitz, as Obama said). Add another one to the Obama gaffe list. That list is really getting long, and growing almost daily.
May 28th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Wow, Obama sucks. Conservatives are awesome. I'm enlightened now.Thanks for the unique perspective, King.
And as if it's not already obvious, these are either criticism in bad faith (you guys are already predisposed to not liking the guy, so I'm having a hard time being impressed by your insights) or they really don't inform us voters about anything beyond the stated notion that Obama makes gaffes. But if he made absolutely zero gaffes, none of you guys would like him anyway. You'd look at that and then call him a calculated, robotic politician who should be trusted that much less since he's apparently less human than everyone else. So it's people who don't like Obama throwing more anti-Obama stuff at the wall. Meh.
Now all that said, do any of you care about not being transparently subjective? If so, then I'm wondering if any kind of gaffe metric exists to measure precisely how gaffe-prone someone is. Is there someone out there who has recorded every publicly spoken word by these guys and then divides that number by the number of gaffes to get some sort of gaffe factor? My guess is not and we basically just come up with a laundry list of hilarious gaffes and then subjectively call Politician X a "Gaffe Riot." Ah, empiricism!
May 28th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Well gee, Brent, I thought it was pretty funny. Okay, tomorrow I'll post a quote where Bush says "misremembered". Better ?
Actually, I was predisposed to liking Obama. The first speech I ever heard him make, I really liked. Then he was the keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He made a nice speech there. I went out and bought his book, The Audacity Of Hope and read it. I went to two Obama campaign rallies. The thing was….the more I heard Obama, the less I liked him. I was always waiting for the substance, but all I got was "hope" and "change". Obama is wrong on the majority of policy issues, and he'e clueless on several.
But I guess I should ignore that and get with the program. Go Obama !
And who ever said I was subjective ?
The thing is, though, all that stuff I wrote about Obama….
its's all true. There is no objective/subjective to it. It's all fact. I'm just reporting it. Granted, I'm not reporting it like the mainstream media would.
May 28th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
"Brent: And as if it's not already obvious, these are either criticism in bad faith (you guys are already predisposed to not liking the guy, so I'm having a hard time being impressed by your insights) or they really don't inform us voters about anything beyond the stated notion that Obama makes gaffes."
Contrary to his wooden persona, Osama is actually human. The sheep touted him as the infallible one and nothing could be further from the truth. Lacking experience, his rise to stardom has been attributed to speaking with a golden tongue, concealing the agendas, and befriending the biased media.
He didn't seem to waste much time attacking McCain on the 100 year quote, nor the Sunni/Shiite mixup. His surrogates have even made McCain's age an issue, citing cause for concern of dementia, senility, and/or rage episodes. Hillary was beaten up for her sniper fire miscue, with equal aggression. I'm confident neither of them would ever stumble to the level of the "57 states" boo-boo.
As Osama's misfires become more prevalent, are we to sympathize with his plight? The flock continues to be the only ones in denial and, eerily reminiscent of Jim Jones' cult, they just can't see beyond the messiah's fabricated front.
When I cast a ballot for McCain, it will be done out of frustration. Preservation of the supreme court, as well as my wallet, are reasons enough for justification. Since all of these candidates are basically worthless, some more than others, even my views are less biased than those mesmerized by Osama's spell.
It appears that the frequent gaffes are really starting to worry his children.
May 28th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
King, that's not quite what I was talking about. Of course anyone can like anyone if they don't bother to look up their legislative record or stances on the issues (which were more than available… he was a state senator, wasn't he? Surely you could've found out from that record that he was no small government libertarian). When I said you guys are predisposed to not liking him, I meant that in the context of everything you know about him before you found out he makes gaffes. In other words, this is a very, very marginal point to write a blog post about considering if he had never made a single gaffe in his life you'd feel exactly the same way about Obama.
And your last point is bizarre. I could be objective and completely correct by noting that Dick Cheney shot a man in the face. And if I don't care about whether or not I'm being fair and putting that in context, I could simply conclude that Cheney shoots people in the face ALL THE TIME. But then someone else who doesn't share my preconceived opinion of Cheney would just completely ignore my point. I'm obviously very subjective when I draw that conclusion without pointing out all the times Cheney fires his gun and DOESN'T shoot someone.
So, if a person utters 10 gaffes out of 17 gazillion publicly spoken sentences, is it fair to say this person is a "Gaffe Riot?" Maybe it is. I don't know what the acceptable gaffe rate is. But your dogmatic assertion that Obama's blunders do cross this unknowable threshold basically just lowers my opinion of you and I roll my eyes that much more the next time you post an opinion. And that's probably fine because it appears you're not interested in being taken seriously as a blogger.
May 28th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Brent—Gaffes are a few of the available clues the public uses to discern how able someone is to be in any position of leadership or responsibility. Perhaps we should all harp on Obama for claiming an uncle who took part in the rescue at Auschwitz as a simple case of false memory, or maybe an attempt to boost himself with a false claim, hoping the claim would be overlooked and no one would fact check him—a show-boat way to boost his Jew Clout, perhaps—-remember you Obama defenders when Hillary was accused of outright fabrication with her Bosnia exaggeration?
Fair is fair—or his assertion that ten thousand people died in Kansas, "a whole town wiped out"—only twelve died, not an entire town—How could Obama say such a thing without thinking about what he was saying?—Don't you think that an on-your- feet thinking person would question himself saying ten thousand people died in an American town before uttering it? Geez, 2,000 or so died in the 9/11 tragedy. Ten thousand would be HUGE news, don't you think? Then people worry about McCain and his possible age-related memory problems! I just get this feeling that Obama is very over-rated and his best talent is regurgitating speeches written by professional speech writers, not by him. This skill does not make a President, or even a CEO of a company or anything else productive but a good talking head—perhaps a Teleprompter reader at a news operation would be a good job for such a man.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Just a slight clarification that needs to be pointed out - Translators serve various functions for the military, and its not unheard of by that a Pashtun linguist would be moved to Iraq to serve some other function because of overstretch, even though ideally he would be best served in Afghanistan. As another example, we have plenty of Korean, Chinese, and other linguists who have been forced out of their regional specialty to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan.
May 29th, 2008 at 3:43 am
Brent,
Obama supporters tell us we aren't supposed to talk about Obama's associates, we aren't supposed to talk about Obama's past, we aren't supposed to talk about Obama's church, we aren't supposed to quote Obama's wife…
Now you're telling me I'm not supposed to talk about the words that come out of Obama's own mouth ? I have to draw the line there.
I've written many posts about Obama's stance on issues, more than I've EVER heard the mainstream media raise, btw. I've made it my mission to bring Obama's policies to light in my own small way, since it appeared the media was going to propel the guy to the presidency with little to no examination.
I realize all politicians on the campaign trail make mistakes. I never claimed otherwise. I also never claimed these Obama gaffes are the sum of his character, knowledge, or beliefs. Mostly, I just thought these things were funny, though a couple of them, such as the FARC quotes, do reveal Obama's lack of knowledge. Every other candidate gets excoriated when they make mistakes like this, whether it's Dan Quayle, who became a laughingstock for misspelling one word, or Hillary for her recent RFK comment. Obama shouldn't be the only one who gets a free pass. He's had a big enough free pass already. I can't remember such an inexperienced candidate ever getting this close to the presidency.
And looking up Obama's state legislative record is no easy task. From what I've been able to find, most of the state bills he takes credit for weren't even written by him, they were written by someone else and Obama took credit.
May 29th, 2008 at 3:45 am
David, so noted. Some translators speak multiple languages and could work in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
May 29th, 2008 at 7:00 am
Obama's stance is the Illinois legislature was 'present,' King.
May 29th, 2008 at 8:57 am
The pitiful attempts here to build mountains out of molehills are a sure sign of desperation and fear.
Good luck majoring on the trivial and inconsequential.
Obama in a landslide.
May 29th, 2008 at 9:30 am
By the way, I didn't realize Obama's uncle served in WWII. He got the wrong location and that's what made headlines, but I find it kind of neat that it took a gaffe to educate me about Obama's family, especially after I've been told a gazillion times that Obama isn't a true American or patriotic or whatever. Cool!
May 29th, 2008 at 11:11 am
This democrat will not vote for Obama. I will not tow the line anymore just because I am a Democrat. I do not trust Obama, I do not like his supporters as I've come to know them, I will no longer trust this party for the sham that it has become.
I will not vote for the junior senator from Hawaii. He is not Presidential material.
I will influence all the people that I know to do the same. I have lost faith in the Democratic Party that I will be included or even listened to. I can't stand the attitudes of the Obama voters or Obama or his wife—these are not my kind of people.
I am done with it.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:59 am
It seems like Obama and his automatons are turning off more and more reality based folks, Elijah.
May 29th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Elijah is a Hillary supporter, which is fine. Hillary, though she's not going to be the nominee, is still miles ahead of Old Stay The Course. If she were the nominee, I would vote for her, proudly…..because even though it's always all about her…..the "it's" part, with Hillary, will mostly come down on the side of the people. She's a solid Democrat when it comes to the issues of the people.
It is too bad that some Hillary supporters will, indeed, either vote for McCain or not vote at all.
A vote for McCain, witout any observable, empirical doubt, is a vote for a third term of Mr. Bush. That would seem like something ALL Americans would want to avoid.
Mr. Obama has run an exceptional campaign and his ground operation has been nothing short of superb. He has avoided the negativity, the trivial….the old politics….and sought to encourage Americans again about the U.S. with explicit plans for going forward.
May 29th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Larry - not according to national polling averages.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/
It'll be really interesting to see how this race plays out. Obama has quite a bit to overcome, but so does McCain in his own right. The structure of the general election certainly helps McCain.
On one hand I can't envison Obama getting elected in America, and on the other, I can't envision McCain winning it either. Someone will rise to the occasion in the end though.
May 29th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
"Without any observable, empirical doubt." That's pretty funny, Reverend.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:14 am
David, I think Obama has a pretty large advantage in the general election for one reason - Bush. The anti-Bush backlash has to be worth at least 15 points for Obama. Probably more.
Even though the 'McCain is a third term of Bush' charge isn't true, which I dealt with partially in my 'The Third Democrat' post, the mainstream media will do everything in it's power to make it seem true, as will the Dems, who can't say 'McCain' now without saying 'Bush' along with it.
McCain could win, but I don't think he's a good enough campaigner to overcome the disadvantage. Once the Democrats choose Obama as the nominee, I expect the polls to swing in his favor very quickly.
I also think the origins of the race factor have been distorted. Race was NOT much of a factor in the Obama candidacy until the Reverend Wright issue reared it's ugly head. That's when many people paused and said to themselves "what's going on here ?" Prior to Rev. Wright, it was white Iowa who put Obama on the map. Now, race IS a factor, but it was Obama's people who made it that way. Witness that nutty priest Pfleger's racist nonsense at Obama's church the other day. THAT'S why race is a bigger factor now. I think most of America is perfectly willing to elect a black president, but some are afraid of this particular candidate now, due to the extremists surrounding him.
The caveat is, of course, that this is politics, so anything can happen.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:25 am
larry,
Didn't I raise some "observable, empirical doubt" just the other day ? I'm sure I did, and I know the Rev read it, because he didn't like me calling McCain a Blue Dog Democrat, or me saying that hardcore Conservatives don't much like McCain (which is a given).
Other than the 12 or so observable, empirical issues on which McCain agrees with the Democrats, he's just like Bush.
Curiously, McCain only became just like Bush about two months ago, when he was chosen as the GOP nominee. Prior to that, McCain was the cool maverick Republican guy that Dems liked. My, how things change.
May 30th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
"Empirical" and "observable" are the Reverend's new "narrative" and "meme." Poser words.
May 31st, 2008 at 6:54 am
Like "reality-based" ?
May 31st, 2008 at 9:29 am
I'm just glad he's given the misogynistic 'p' word a rest for a week. He's replaced that one with his homophobic 'brokeback' entries, though.
May 31st, 2008 at 9:34 am
"Reality based" is certainly one of Rev Red's favorite terms that many of us are very used to seeing him say. I have been wondering if those words used together and applied to the fact that Obama just isn't much when he ad libs just a tiny bit could be true. The man has delivered all his best gaffes outside the prepared words of his campaign deliveries. It is so obvious that his writers wouldn't have included them for him to say. In reality, I think that when he speaks one of his "funny" bombs he is indicating just how fast he does think on his own. I wonder if he will be able to drag his speech writers around with him everywhere he goes on his diplomatic meetings. I wonder how many of those people Bush refuses to meet with would not see through Obama having to have his writers tell him what to say at all times.
I don't know what "reality based" means outside the far left members but I do think that Obama's need for all those free passes gets more necessary as time goes on. He is fast becoming a "poor soul" as one of the others who writes here has been called by me for years.
May 31st, 2008 at 10:56 am
Good to hear the input from Kansas. How's that Democratic governor doing out there in Kansas, roy?
Scott McClellan just laid out what "reality based" means. With you, roy, I'm sure it doesn't register….because, oddly, you've been reluctant to embrace reality. The numerous crimes of the GOP administration and complicity by GOP Congress members is the "reality" that you and the 28 percent dead-enders won't accept.
Instead, predictably, roy,….you and the usual suspects turn to trivialities and nonsensical gotchas.
You know that I have been warning of the imminent collapse of the Republican Party for years. Now it's about to happen.
Who then, was more accurate in his predictions?
Obama is a very good candidate…..possibly the best in my lifetime. He will make a great president.