"Obama suggested he was like a young Haley Joel Osment in "The Sixth Sense," with the ability to see dead people..."
I see RED people.
Posted on 05/27/2008 11:41:48 PM PDT by Kaslin
magine that John McCain named a young running mate to campaign with him, and this national rookie suggested America had 58 states, repeatedly used the wrong names for the cities he was visiting, and honored a Memorial Day crowd by acknowledging the "fallen heroes" who were present, somehow alive and standing in the audience. How long would it take for the national media to see another Dan Quayle caricature? Let's raise the stakes. What if it was the GOP presidential candidate making these thoroughly ridiculous comments? This scenario is very real, except it isn't McCain. It's the other fellow.
ABC reporter Jake Tapper follows politicians around for a living. On his blog, he suggested Barack Obama has a problem: "The man has been a one-man gaffe machine."
Just in the last few days, in Sunrise, Fla., Obama said, "How's it going, Sunshine?" He did the same thing in Sioux Falls, S.D., calling it "Sioux City." Some of his geographic struggles seem calculated. When asked why Hillary Clinton trounced him in Kentucky, Obama claimed "I'm not very well known in that part of the country ... 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." But Obama's home state of Illinois is more than "near" Kentucky -- it borders Kentucky.
In Oregon, there was a doozy. Obama said of his long campaign, "I've been in 57 states, I think, one left to go." No one in the press made much of this. As former ABC political reporter Marc Ambinder, now with the Atlantic Monthly magazine, admitted: "But if John McCain did this -- if he mistakenly said he'd visited 57 states -- the media would be all up in his grill, accusing him of a senior moment." If you doubt him, remember how most media outlets noted, then underlined McCain's error about al-Qaeda being trained and funded by Iran.
In New Mexico, Obama suggested he was like a young Haley Joel Osment in "The Sixth Sense," with the ability to see dead people: "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." Fallen heroes in the audience? Is this Barack Potatoe Obama? This is precisely the kind of misstatement that Dan Quayle-bashers would run ad infinitum.
But there have also been gaffes on more serious matters. ABC found that campaigning in Rush Limbaugh's hometown of Cape Girardeau, Mo., Obama argued that our military's Arabic translators in Iraq are needed in Afghanistan: "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," he claimed. But Afghans don't speak Arabic; they speak several other languages. That's a lot like McCain's gaffe -- except for the degree of media attention, which in the Democrat's case was virtually nonexistent.
McCain also would have enjoyed more media focus on Obama's completely muddled analysis of South America last week. He told the Orlando Sentinel on Thursday that he would meet with Chavez to discuss "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 on Friday in Miami, he insisted any country supporting the Marxist guerrillas of FARC should suffer "regional isolation." This left Obama advisers scrambling to suggest that these two opposing statements can somehow be put together, that he can meet Chavez and isolate him at the same time.
Sometimes, Obama invents Bosnia-sniper-style whoppers about his personal history. In Selma, Ala., Obama claimed that the spirit of hope derived from the civil rights protests in Selma in 1965 inspired his birth -- when he was born in 1961. He also has inaccurately claimed that the Kennedys funded his Kenyan father's trip to America in 1959.
While he was making boo-boos in New Mexico on Memorial Day, Obama also (according to CBS reporter/blogger Maria Gavrilovic) talked about post-traumatic stress disorder by claiming he had an uncle "who was part of the American brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz," and then came home and spent six months in an attic. Gavrilovic didn't note that the prisoners at Auschwitz were liberated by the Red Army. Obama earlier made the claim on his campaign site that his grandfather knew American troops who liberated Auschwitz and Treblinka (also liberated by the Red Army).
Everyone should grant these candidates a little room for error in the long slog of presidential campaigning. But what about some balance? The same national media that turned Dan Quayle's name into an instant joke are now working over time to present Obama as Captain Competent.
Obama probably isn't aware that Illinois extends beyond Chicago city limits.
"Obama suggested he was like a young Haley Joel Osment in "The Sixth Sense," with the ability to see dead people..."
I see RED people.
If Obama didn’t look like the smiling pygmy from The Gods Must Be Crazy and sound like Dan Rather, he’d be nowhere. Or, in other words, if he looked like Al Sharpton and sounded like Jesse Jackson, he’d be as far from the political mainstream as they are.
I heard Quayle speak at a conference, a couple of years after he left office. Up until that time, I had assumed he was some kind of nit wit, because that's what the media had consistently told the public.
Quayle spoke for about twenty minutes, without notes. He was engaging, intelligent and downright eloquent. I was stunned! I quickly realized that the media had done a hatchet job on him during his time as VP, and no one had ever bothered to defend him (unfortunately typical of Republicans).
As an aside, FWIW, I looked up the spelling of potato in the dictionary. Guess what? There is more than one accepted spelling. Potatoe is actually correct. No, it isn't the first choice, but in essence, Quayle wasn't wrong. Journalists apparently don't own dictionaries. Or they assume that the public doesn't own them, so they can say whatever they want and people will just swallow it. Shame on them and shame on us.
BTW, Obama can trip all over his tongue and the media is never going to take him to task for it - but you knew that.
Excellent article from Brent who easily exposes once again the brazen and shameless hypocrisy of the “mainstream” Democrat newsrooms (with the one notable exception of Jake Tapper).
Those “mainstream” Democrat newsrooms continue to protect Obama the way a mother protects a slow child.
But more important, why are you just now discovering the hatchet job on Quayle? That was understood in the 80s. Where have you been?
bump
Osama bin Laden and his buds ain't no Afghans.
Sounds like ChicagahAl has been keeping up with current events--the idea that many people are new to politics and don't realize the things that were hashed out back then, along with commenting on something relevant to the thread title.
Dan Quayle was always extremely gracious, it seemed. He signed a copy of the Murphy Brown speech for me...I told him that I liked the speech and understood the message, rather than mocked it.
And without much fanfare or credit, he saved our country's satellite data that was going to be discarded by Congress.
I'd take him in a heartbeat over Obama, whose gaffes are totally overlooked by the MSM in most cases.
The Taliban do speak the Afghan languages, and the Taliban is the outfit that is trying to make a comeback and retake the areas they lost control over.
That is mainly who we are fighting over there.
Al-qaeda is more the “hide in a cave” type of outfit and appear to be more in Pakistan than Afghanistan, although able to cross borders when needed, obviously.
Must be something about that Harvard education.... Or maybe he was too stoned to remember history class, what was his major anyway? Dishwashing?
Don’t be so hard on him.
I rather appreciated his take on that event.
My question is; who holds the strings that are making Obama dance?
I have seen enough of this mutt to believe that there is a "hidden planet" out there controlling the guy. Who is it?
Peckerwoods lol!!
FWIS, I read years ago that before the spelling incident, Quayle was handed a placard with Potato spelled with the E tacked on.
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