362 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographynight? There was a rising demand that the Obama campaign drop their enemies’ list operation
against Larry Sinclair, release him from jail at once, and halt their vendetta against him.
SIGNS OF OBAMA’S MENTAL DISINTEGRATION: THE GAFFES
The right-wing commentator Michelle Malkin called attention to Obama’s unprecedented string
of public gaffes: for Malkin, Obama was ‘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
Kansas tornadoes 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:
- 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, South Dakota 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, Alabama, 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, 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 - 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, Missouri, Obama showed off his knowledge of the war in
Afghanistan by honing 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. Over the weekend in Oregon, Obama pleaded ignorance of
the decades-old, multi-billion-dollar massive Hanford nuclear waste clean-up: “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.’^185 Obama first said Iran was a tiny country that did not pose a threat, then that it
was not a threat a few days later – a very ominous and light-headed performance.
When Obama was in Sunrise, Florida, he thought he was in Sunshine, Florida: “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.^186 On Memorial Day 2008, Obama intoned: “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. (New Mexico, Memorial Day 2008) Obama
also boasted that his grandmother’s brother, Charlie Payne, helped liberate a Buchenwald sub-camp
in April 1945 as part of the 89th Infantry Division. But it was the Soviet Red Army that freed the
inmates of Auschwitz.^187 None of this made any impact on the swooners of the controlled corporate
media. Arch-oligarch David Broder, for example, continued to write hogwash like this about