UK Telegraph
In an embarrassing slip of the tongue, Mr Kerry last week praised US diplomats working to secure “democratic institutions” in the Central Asian country, which does not exist.
The newly minted diplomat was referring to Kyrgyzstan, a poor, landlocked nation of 5.5 million, which he appeared to confuse with its resource-rich neighbour to the north, Kazakhstan.
Hero in his own mind, Barack Obama continues to mangle things military, as when he criticized the 22-minute film “Dishonorable Disclosures.”
‘You’ve got one who was a candidate, a Republican candidate for office. And a proud card carrying member of the Tea Party. So this is obviously a partisan film.
‘I’d advise that you talk to General McRaven, who’s in charge of our Special Ops. I think he has a point of view in terms of how deeply.
I care about what these folks do each and every day to protect our freedom.’
He just doesn’t care enough to master the services’ ranks and branches.
The difficulty with this is that William McRaven is and admiral not a general. As a SEAL, he is member of the US Navy, not US Army or US Marines.
Obama has made mistakes with military terminology before. In February 2010, he mispronounced ‘corpsman’ – as ‘corpse-man’ instead of ‘core-man’ several times.
Look for Obama to take the stage at the Democrat convention with a salute and a “reporting for duty.”
That’s what you get when you beat the Oklahoma City Thunders.
Mister smooth flubs it again. One wonders, did he pronounce Polish like shoe polish?
US President Barack Obama’s description of a Nazi German Holocaust site as a “Polish death camp” shocked Poland, whose leaders insist the record be set straight 67 years after World War II.
Obama on Tuesday labeled the Nazi facility used to process Jews for extermination as a “Polish death camp.” The White House later said the president “misspoke” and expressed “regret”.
The linguistic faux pas overshadowed Obama’s posthumous award of the highest US civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to Jan Karski, a former Polish underground officer who provided early eyewitness accounts of Nazi Germany’s genocide of European Jews.
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Wednesday Obama’s words had hurt all Poles and he expected more from Washington than just “regret”.
“I am convinced that our American friends can today allow themselves a stronger reaction than a simple expression of regret from the White House spokesman — a reaction more inclined to eliminate once and for all these kinds of errors,” Tusk told reporters in Warsaw.
“Today, this is a problem for the reputation of the United States,” the prime minister said.
Poland’s anti-communist icon Lech Walesa meanwhile termed Obama’s error a “golden occasion” to set the historical record straight.
Between 1939 and 1945, nearly six million Polish citizens perished under Nazi Germany’s brutal World War II occupation of their country.
More than half of Poland’s victims were of Jewish origin and they, in turn, accounted for half of the six million European Jews who perished during the Holocaust.
Many were killed in death camps set up by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland — including the most notorious, Auschwitz-Birkenau…
For a purported smart guy, Obama often sticks his foot in his mouth (and his hand over the face of other world leaders in group photos). Twice he pronounced Marine Corps as “corpse,” suggesting his ample staff didn’t catch the blunder the first time or is afraid to correct their boss.
His latest gaffe is a two-fer, getting both his geography and politics wrong.
Yesterday Barack Obama addressed the Summit of the Americas in Colombia and spoke about the conflict between the United Kingdom and Argentina over the Falklands. Obama seemed to tilt toward Argentina by calling the islands the “Malvinas” rather than the Falklands, which Argentina insists is their proper name.
Only Obama didn’t say Malvinas, he said Maldives–an entirely different group of islands located thousands of miles from the Falklands in the Indian Ocean:
So with one word, Obama both offended the British and made himself a laughingstock with the Latin Americans. Here in the U.S., we are used to such embarrassing errors by our president, but the international press hasn’t quite caught up.
My complaint, specifically, is about this account of Obama’s gaffe in the Telegraph, not a particularly left-wing paper by British standards. The Telegraph’s article is headlined “Barack Obama makes Falklands gaffe by calling Malvinas the Maldives.” It begins:
Barack Obama made an uncharacteristic error, more akin to those of his predecessor George W Bush, by referring to the Falkland Islands as the Maldives.
Really? When did Mr. Bush ever display such geographic ignorance? It is Obama, not Bush, who is prone to putting his foot in his mouth in a matter that causes diplomatic embarrassment. Can we finally, after well over three years, leave his predecessor out of it and let Obama own his many gaffes and blunders?
As for the politics, why kiss up to Argentina, which is slowly slipping back into dictatorship? Just today, the Argentine government nationalized the nation’s largest oil company. Last month, they banned foreign books over a contrived concern over lead in ink.
Perhaps Obama forgot that in the 1980s Britain went to war with Argentina — then under a military dictatorship — over the Falkland Islands. Not the Malvinas and certainly not the Maldives.
The White House should fact check the prez before he insults the GOP for being ignorant.
Such as this jibe for not buying into his windmills approach to energy:
“They might have even sided with one of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, who reportedly said this about the telephone: ‘It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?’ That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore, because he’s looking backwards, he’s not looking forwards.”
But Hayes never said that. Washington Post:
…Hayes, in fact, was such a technology buff that he installed the first telephone in the White House. A list of telephone subscribers published in the article “The Telephones Comes to Washington,” by Richard T. Loomis, shows that the White House was given the number “1.”
His cocky crap has inspired a hilarious outpouring of crowd-sourced scorn. Here’s just one sample. There are dozens:
Then there are the tweets for the twit.
#BarackObamasPresidentialFacts Woodrow Wilson was lost at sea while attempting to escape with Tom Hanks from a deserted isle
#BarackObamasPresidentialFacts Calvin Coolidge was known by hipsters of the roaring 20s as LL Coolidge and enjoyed his “Coolidge cookies
#BarackObamasPresidentialFacts Ulysses S. Grant was our first Greek president.
Obama is ready, but there’s no shovel.
It was a rather odd sight: as an array of museum officials, including former first lady Laura Bush, took up shovels at the groundbreaking for the first national museum dedicated exclusively to African-American history and culture, the nation’s first black president sat watching, no shovel in hand.
…When he finished and returned to his seat, a call was put out for groundbreakers to gather at the front of the stage. Obama then stood, buttoned his jacket and prepared to join in. But an official whispered something to him and he sat back down as museum officials and members of the museum’s advisory council, including the former first lady, picked up shovels for the ceremonial turning of the dirt. The Obamas remained on stage.
White House officials said that only museum officials and advisers were scheduled to take part in the shoveling. They said that was part of the agreed upon plan between the White House and the museum.
Marine “Corpse” anyone? Do they speak Austrian in Austria?
The Gaff-o-matic keeps on keepin’ on.
Just a few weeks ago, Barack Obama hailed the ‘extraordinarily special relationship’ between America and Britain.
But it is clearly one he doesn’t know all that much about if his latest foreign policy gaffe is anything to go by.
The U.S. President has come under fire today after referring to the ‘English’ instead of the British Embassy in his condemnation of the violence that broke out at the building in Iran yesterday.
But wait, he’ll get it right the next time. He’s a professor after all.
In an interview yesterday, Mr Obama said: ‘All of us are deeply disturbed by the, err, crashing of, err, the English Embassy, err, the embassy of the United Kingdom.’
By calling it the ‘embassy of the United Kingdom’, he got it wrong a second time.
…Nile Gardiner, a blogger on The Foundry who led the criticism, said: ‘In case the President is unaware, England forms part of Great Britain, which also includes Scotland and Wales, though not Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom.
‘One can only imagine the kind of howls of derision that would greet any presidential contender if that kind of basic error were made before, say, the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
‘It would be nice if the leader of the free world bothered to look at a map once in a while.’
Asked how he liked his snack, Cain can be heard asking, “How do you say ‘delicious’ in Cuban?”
Cubans speak Spanish.
…like Obama, who thinks Austrians speak “Austrian.”
Obama blew it about Abe Lincoln founding the Republican party.
He gives a good speech, but he’s loose with the facts. He called Abraham Lincoln the “founder” of the Republican Party. Nope. Lincoln was not the founder of the party; he wasn’t even the first Republican nominee (John Fremont was, in 1856). Lincoln was, of course, the first Republican to be elected president.
Was this a GOP critic of the One? Nope, it was Jay Carney, at the time senior editor for Time magazine, busting Mike Huckabee for his gaffe.
Jay Carney is now Obama’s White House press secretary.
This is so stupid. PBS altered the transcript of Obama’s speech to fix a mistake.
The gaffe was minor. It wouldn’t even be worth a mention had not Sarah Palin been pilloried for her (historically correct) Paul Revere comment.
PBS would risk it’s already tarnished reputation for this?
Timothy Birdnow at the American Thinker:
The New York Times transcript has the following quote:
“We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. Founder of the Republican Party. But in the middle of a civil war, he was also a leader who looked to the future — a Republican President who mobilized government to build the Transcontinental Railroad — (applause) — launch the National Academy of Sciences, set up the first land grant colleges. (Applause.) And leaders of both parties have followed the example he set.”
But how does it appear in the PBS transcript?
“We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. But in the middle of a Civil War, he was also a leader who looked to the future – a Republican president who mobilized government to build the transcontinental railroad; launch the National Academy of Sciences; and set up the first land grant colleges. And leaders of both parties have followed the example he set.”
A more substantive gaffe was citing a Georgia jobs program as an example to follow. That program is is flopping big time.
A man as inexperienced and inept as Obama needs all the good counsel he can get. But President Cocky thinks otherwise.
…In the first two years of Obama’s presidency, his top aides had grown accustomed to a process in which Obama drew out and explored the views of his full team and searched for a consensus — decision by ballot, some called it.
Increasingly, however, that process has changed, according to a wide group of Obama’s personal friends, informal advisors and top aides interviewed during the spring. In recent months, they say, the president has been relying more heavily on his own instincts and feeling less impelled to seek accord among advisors.
The change, which came into view with the Egypt decision in February, was vividly on display in the meetings that led to the decision to send a team of Navy SEALs to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.
The success of the Bin Laden raid reinforced Obama’s security in his own judgments, aides said.
“I think he reached a point where he had to trust his instincts, and there was nothing left to inform his decision except to do that,” said one advisor who is intimately familiar with the president’s thinking on foreign policy matters and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
This brings to mind Obama’s growing list of gaffes, some real doozies, such as blabbing during the singing of God Save the Queen until she called him off.
How can such a purportedly brilliant president make such blunders?
Big Media doesn’t pay much attention to them, even though Obama makes an amazing number of errors in his public statements. And I think it’s easy enough to understand why the BM largely ignores them: to report them all would totally undermine the image of the president to which a surprising number of “reporters” and pundits are wedded: that of an unusually intelligent and well educated man.
Yet someone who tells a crowd in Vienna that his “Austrian” isn’t very good, who tells Marines that he’s pleased to speak to the “Marine Corpse,” and who, just today, said he’d given the Medal of Honor to a survivor from the 10th Mountain Division, when in fact the award was given posthumously, doesn’t fit my definition of a brilliant and cultured man.
Yes, there was a Medal of Honor winner who lived to receive it, but it was a different man. The living honoree is named Giunta; the deceased hero from the 10th Mountain Division was named Monti. Both are Italian names. Did a White House speechwriter confuse the two Italians? And if so, what does that tell us about the ship under the command of President Obama? That’s worth pondering for a moment.
When you add up all the mistakes he’s made–not slips of the tongue, but real errors in statements and speeches he could read from the ubiquitous teleprompter–they make quite a number. So what? you may ask. The answer is that hundreds of people traditionally read the drafts of presidential speeches and statements. That happens for two good reasons. First, presidential utterances are instant policy. It’s hard to walk away from a public statement. Second, the myriad political appointees want their leader to look good, and they strain to ensure the accuracy of his statements. Or at least they did when I had first-hand knowledge of such things, now a few years back.
I don’t think that is happening in this administration.
Obama trying to cozy up to the troops…
“Throughout my service, first as a senator and then as a presidential candidate and then as a President, I’ve always run into you guys. And for some reason it’s always in some rough spots.
First time I saw 10th Mountain Division, you guys were in southern Iraq. When I went back to visit Afghanistan, you guys were the first ones there. I had the great honor of seeing some of you because a comrade of yours, Jared Monti, was the first person who I was able to award the Medal of Honor to who actually came back and wasn’t receiving it posthumously.”
The problem is, Jared Monti was killed in action in Afghanistan, on June 21, 2006. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously, September 17, 2009. President Obama handed the framed medal to his parents, Paul and Janet Monti. He and the First Lady comforted them in the Oval Office following the ceremony.
Just imagine the snickering if Bush had done this.
Last week Obama cited “Teutonic” shifts happening in the Mideast. Later, the White House scrubbed the transcript to read “tectonic.”
No big deal. Even presidents are human.
But Bush was never afforded such slack — every stumble was cited as evidence he was a moron.
Now Obama has signed gotten the today’s date wrong by three years.
