Free Republic

<p>Obama, all his advisers, and the fawning MSM are clueless.</p> <p>As mistakes go, I would say this is the ultimate. A prepared speech (not an off-the-teleprompter gaffe), announced days in advance to the world. How is a mistake this huge possible? There is no chance he misread (misspoke), otherwise, there would be no mention of Belfast in that portion of the speech.</p>

Remember when McCain said that he had visited all 57 States during his campaign? Then there was the time that McCain said "Well let me be absolutely clear. Israel is a strong friend of Israel's." Oh, and what about the time that McCain said "10,000 people died" in the Kansas tornadoes (death toll really 12). Crazy stuff, eh? Wait, let's not forget when McCain said that Arkansas was a "nearby" state to Kentucky. Man was that a major flub showing a complete lack of knowledge of simple geography. Hmm, wait a minute. I might be making a flub myself, here....

The Obamamessiah is far too busy campaigning to keep track of what his responsibilities in the Senate are to the American people. Perhaps that is why we have this latest little gaffe: (see link for video) Here’s the transcript: This, this, uh, this past week we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to, uh, call for divestment from Iran. The only problem? The U.S. Senate Banking Committee isn’t Obama’s committee. He doesn’t serve on it, nor does he serve on any of its subcommittees. Yet Mr. Smooth Operator over there effortlessly lied...

Video. This one is a little unnerving. Either we’re missing something, or Obama needs medication and some quality time with a psychiatrist.

For those of you who don't keep up with the conservative blogosphere, one of the memes they've been trying to push for the past couple of weeks is this: Barack Obama may give a good prepared speech, but his dirty little secret is that he's actually an empty suit who's totally at sea without a teleprompter. Today, for example, Andy McCarthy, offers up this snippet from an Obama press conference in Jerusalem: Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran, as a way...

(CNN) – Responding to an Israeli reporter’s question Wednesday on his commitment to protect the Jewish state, Barack Obama pointed to a bill “we passed” in the U.S. Senate Banking Committee that tightens sanctions and authorizes divestment from Iran. “My committee,” he called it. Except that he isn’t a member of the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. “Just this past week, we passed out of the out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee - which is my committee - a bill to call for divestment from Iran as way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they...

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said “Iraq” on Monday when he apparently meant “Afghanistan”, adding to a string of mixed-up word choices that is giving ammunition to the opposition. Just in the past three weeks, McCain has also mistaken "Somalia" for "Sudan," and even football’s Green Bay Packers for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Ironically, the errors have been concentrated in what should be his area of expertise: foreign affairs. McCain will turn 72 the day after Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) accepts his party’s nomination for president at the age of 47, calling new attention to the sensitive issue of McCain’s advanced age...

RUSH: Grab audio sound bite number 26 first, Mike. I didn't know we'd get to this this early. I asked Cookie to put together a little montage here of all the stuttering around that Obama did in his press conference today and I want you to hear this because -- and we didn't repeat anything here. It goes 46 seconds, and we're doing this because we hear constantly, "What a great orator and a great communicator! Ohhhh, this man is smooth!" Just listen. This is a great illustration here of what happened when you take the teleprompter and your prepared...

"Let me be absolutely clear," Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, said today at a press conference in Amman, Jordan. "Israel is a strong friend of Israel's. It will be a strong friend of Israel's under a McCain...administration. It will be a strong friend of Israel's under an Obama administration. So that policy is not going to change."

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) said “Iraq” when he apparently meant “Afghanistan” on Monday, adding to a string of mixed-up word choices that is giving ammunition to the opposition. Just in the past three weeks, McCain has mixed up Iraq and Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan, and even football’s Packers and Steelers. Ironically, the errors have been concentrated in what should be his area of expertise - foreign affairs.

On this morning's "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, co-host Tiki Barber asked guest Dan Rather about his feelings regarding the recent Jesse Jackson imbroglio -- his "off mike" comments about Barack Obama. In the middle of praising Jackson, Rather referred to Barack Obama as "Osama bin Laden" -- and none of the four "Morning Joe" co-hosts reacted (nor did Rather). Question: Will the media pick this up? That one of America's longest-serving network news anchors referred to one of the two presidential candidates as the world's most wanted terrorist -- and no one in the room seemed to notice? While you...

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, the reputed “Constitutional scholar,” just today said on CBS’s Face the Nation that he went to Iraq to talk to important leader that he expects to be “dealing with over the next eight to 10 years.” So, does this “Constitutional scholar” not realize that there is this little thing called the 22nd Amendment that holds a president to only two, four year terms? Um, that would be a grand total of only 8 years, Barack, not 8 to 10. Of course, the big question is, will we see this idiot gaffe race through the MSM...

Senator Barack Obama has demanded plans be drawn up immediately for US troops to be redeployed from Iraq to Afghanistan. Visiting Kabul on the first stop of his first major overseas trip since winning the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, Mr Obama described conditions in Afghanistan as "precarious and urgent". "I think the situation is getting urgent enough that we have to start doing something now," he told CBS television. "We can't wait for a new administration otherwise it will be a year before new troops arrive." Mr Obama, who is also due to visit Iraq during his eight-day tour, sought...

Obama "[T]he objective of this trip was to have substantive discussions with people like President Karzai or Prime Minister Maliki or President Sarkozy or others who I expect to be dealing with over the next eight to 10 years. Hope we have time to get the 22nd Amendment get amended. Unless, of course, he can get elected and pack the Supreme Court with lefties, in which case they can read the byzantineley worded Amendment, No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice. to say that twice is actually a term of art meaning "thrice."

BERLIN: The decision by Senator Barack Obama to speak at a landmark monument in Berlin this Thursday has opened up yet another controversy, with conservative and opposition politicians saying the site recalls Germany's Nazi past and Prussia's militaristic tradition. Obama is planning to address what organizers expect will be huge crowds at the Siegessäule, or Victory Column, which is located in the center of a long and busy intersection that straddles the lush, public Tiergarten gardens and stretches up to the Brandenburg Gate. SNIP After days of back and forth between the chancellery and the Obama campaign, the Victory Column...

After receiving a hailstorm of criticism for considering Brandenburg Gate for a public speech, as well as official German dissuasion, Barack Obama moved the venue to the Siegessäule monument. Obama will speak about “historic� US-German relations, but once again, Obama’s own grasp of history has been proven deficient. Not only does the site contain a monument to Prussian victories over other American allies in Europe, its placement was decided by Adolf Hitler — in order to impress crowds in his idealized version of Berlin called Germania: Still, even as the issue of his speech’s location has now been settled, a...

Barack Obama delivered a speech in West Lafeyette, IN on Wednesday and once again mangled some well known historical facts: Throughout our history, America's confronted constantly evolving danger, from the oppression of an empire, to the lawlessness of the frontier, from the bomb that fell on Pearl Harbor, to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Americans have adapted to the threats posed by an ever-changing world. Aaah yes – "the bomb that fell on Pearl Harbor." Who can forget that? It was the big one, the one that took out all those boats. I guess Obama's political correctness prevents him from...

The staggering implications of another embarrassing Obama statement would remain unexplored, with the public record obscured, were it not for a video clip of one of his speeches posted to the web and alert internet journalists. As first developed by World Net Daily's Joseph Farah, the story is about what the candidate said in Colorado Springs on July 2nd: We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded. Published transcripts of the...

A video that the MSM won’t show you. In fact the Obama campaign doesn’t have it on their website and no transcript can be found for this speech in Colorado Springs. Peculiar… Unfortunately for the Obama campaign the speech can be had on YouTube. (Video Included)

The stunning comments from Democrat Sen. Barack Obama that the United States needs a "civilian national security force" that would be as powerful, strong and well-funded as the half-trillion dollar United States Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force have mysteriously disappeared from published transcripts of the speech. In the comments, Obama confirmed the U.S. "cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set." Campaign officials have declined to return any of a series of WND telephone calls over several days requesting a comment on the situation. Nor have they posted a transcript...

"Nation of whiners"? I don't know how you flesh out with mathematical exactitude ex-Sen. Phil Gramm's famous assertion of last week concerning how we talk about the economy. I'll say this: There's a lot of whining go on, and if, as Phil avers, he was "talking about our leaders," not our people in general, he makes a serious point with something of the blunt force requisite to the task. Alas for him! The glory of the First Amendment to the Constitution is that it lets you say practically anything about practically everything. The fly in the buttermilk is you can't...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said on Sunday he used "poor phrasing" in a speech supporting Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel. "You know, the truth is that this was an example where we had some poor phrasing in the speech. And we immediately tried to correct the interpretation that was given," he said in an interview aired on Sunday on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria -- GPS." "The point we were simply making was, is that we don't want barbed wire running through Jerusalem, similar to the way it was prior to the '67 war, that it...

Barack Obama’s comment that Americans should teach their children Spanish rather than worry about whether immigrants speak English gave another example of his arrogance and elitist impulses earlier this week. In a memorable moment, he pronounced himself “embarrassed” by Americans who travel abroad and can’t speak the local language — which called into question why he doesn’t get similarly perturbed by foreigners who move here and can’t speak ours. Today, Obama tried to “clarify” his comments by wondering aloud why people found them offensive: “This is an example of some of the problems we get into when somebody attacks you...

WHITE House hopeful Barack Obama has said the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai has not "gotten out of the bunker" to rebuild the war-torn country. Senator Obama's comments, ahead of an expected visit to Afghanistan in the coming weeks, drew immediate fire from Republicans, who accused him of insulting a key US "war on terror" ally. Senator Obama also said in an interview with CNN, to be broadcast in full this weekend, that the Bush administration had allowed al-Qaeda and the Taliban to regroup, by diverting vital US forces to the war in Iraq. "I think the Karzai government...

Carly Fiorina has headed a major Silicon Valley corporation, ascended to the rank of America's top female business icon, authored a book - and now is on the short list of possible GOP vice presidential candidates. But now the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard has a new challenge: As a leader of Republican National Committee's 2008 "Victory" drive and a chief adviser to presidential candidate John McCain, she's being buffeted by intense criticism that, as a star campaign surrogate, she is playing fast and loose with the facts. --snip-- It wasn't the first such slip-up, Keenan said. Fiorina's public reassurance to...

Obama Ignorance Watch: What Do the Joint Chiefs Really Do? Before the long weekend began, Barack Obama made a semi-flip-flop regarding the situation in Iraq, even allowing that the surge had achieved some stability and that the next president would be foolish to fritter away those gains. Predictably, this acknowledgement of the obvious triggered howls of outrage on the left. Obama firmly stuck to his new position for almost two full hours before assembling the press once more to reaffirm his long-expressed intention to abandon Iraq. “I am absolutely committed to ending the war,” the longtime community organizer declared. “I...

...More importantly however is the fact that news organizations across the country conveniently failed to publish this portion of Obama’s remarks. Both CNN Online and The New York Times published excerpts of the speech that omitted the gaffe. Two reporters, however, took it upon themselves to alter the text of Obama’s speech in articles they published...

Succumbing to an avalanche of criticism, Sen. Barack Obama's campaign has apparently decided to back away from its trial balloon of a new presidential seal. Newsmax’s lead story Monday morning reported on Obama’s new version of the presidential seal, but a campaign spokesman now says it won’t be used again. “That was a one-time thing for a one-time event,” Robert Gibbs asserted to CNN about the rather intricately designed seal that made its debut last Friday. The new seal was unveiled on Obama's podium when he spoke to a group of Democratic governors. The Obama seal did include the American...

A trifecta of gaffes has Obama taking heat even from some of his biggest fans. A McCain opportunity?Barack Obama is endangering his status as the media darling of the 2008 presidential campaign. In fact, he has been the villain in the campaign story over the last few days. Two decisions — one small and one large — showed the dangers he faces. And a third showed that the post-racial candidate is no longer in evidence. It is no secret that the media has been openly rooting for Obama for months. His gaffes would have felled other candidates, his relationship with...

Like the man says, he insists on the suppression of ego; he just didn’t realize it might come off as egotistical to debut his very own presidential seal until his friends and allies in the media politely informed him of it. And so under the bus it goes, assuming there’s any room left under there with Wright, Pfleger, Rezko and who knows who else crowded in. I’ve had my fun with the Obama campaign’s seal, and now that fun ends. I’m told that Obama recognizes that it was a silly mistake, that the universal reaction at Wacker and Michigan was,...

SPEAKING without a text in front of him, Barack Obama betrays a troubling lack of knowledge on important issues - such as the law and terrorism. In his ABC interview last Monday, for example, Obama attacked the Bush approach on fighting terror. He claimed that, in the case of "the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in US prisons, incapacitated."

[Fred Thompson writes:] Our Democratic friends are once again scrambling to defend Senator Obama's latest national security gaffe. Obama supports the recent Supreme Court majority opinion in the Boumediene decision, which extended for the first time habeas corpus rights to foreign enemy combatants held abroad. The Senator went even further than the Court and said that accused terrorists should be tried in American courts as was Omar Abdel Rahman, "the blind sheik", who masterminded the first World Trade Center bombing. Last week, in a call with reporters and bloggers, I pointed out Obama's folly. The Rahman case demonstrates some of...

Obama Says "Uhh" 144 Times in Eleven Minutes during Press Conference Barack Obama, the golden-tongued orator, is a totally different person when he cannot read a speech someone wrote for him from a teleprompter. Hot Air.com posted a link to a CNN video of Obama making a statement and answering questions. A sharp Hot Air.com commenter posted the following about the video: I watched the whole 11:09. I don’t remember a thing he said. All I heard was uh, uh, uh, uh, and uh. He talks for 4 minutes. I counted 55 uhs. Then he takes questions. First answer: 10...

McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann today on a conference call noted that Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, said he didn't want to make Osama bin Laden a martyr. "The last I checked, a martyr is someone who dies for a cause or someone who is killed for a cause," Scheunemann said. "It seems that Senator Obama is ruling out capital punishment."

The November election is, and remains, Barack Obama’s to lose. Usually, candidates whose victories are entirely in their own hands make it through. It is clear Obama’s path to victory is through the teleprompter. Let him give a big speech and he drives it like Tiger Woods hitting a fairway, as he did Sunday with his stunning sermon about the importance of fathers. But let him sit for an interview with a well-prepared reporter who isn’t interested in shilling for him and Obama makes mistake after mistake. This is what happened the other day with ABC’s Jake Tapper, who got...

Barack Obama, the golden-tongued orator, is a totally different person when he cannot read a speech someone wrote for him from a teleprompter. Hot Air.com posted a link to a CNN video of Obama making a statement and answering questions. A sharp Hot Air.com commenter posted the following about the video: I watched the whole 11:09. I don’t remember a thing he said. All I heard was uh, uh, uh, uh, and uh. He talks for 4 minutes. I counted 55 uhs. Then he takes questions. First answer: 10 uhs Second answer: 27 uhs Third answer: 16 uhs Fourth answer:...

ABC News reports Barack Obama praising the Supreme Court decision in Boumediene et al v Bush that gave Habeas Corpus Rights to those in Guantanomo Bay. Obama said that "I think we should make it an issue" in the election and I happen to agree. I don't agree with him when he says the decision "said we are going to live up to our ideals when it comes to rule of law." The fact is that we were living up to our ideals just fine, that there was a system of military tribunals. The fact is that historically the rule...

One of our faithful readers — who I shall call Z — prepared a quiz, particularly for Mr. Obama.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Over the weekend, the guy that runs the Little Green Footballs blog, Charles Johnson, found a bunch of things on Obama's website. One of them was the truth of the Jewish lobby and it was one of the most anti-Semitic posts that you've ever seen, and it was still up there, and finally the Obama website took it down. There was also praise from some Muslim militant that was on the website. There are a lot of things -- and I told you this during the primaries and the superdelegates know this -- they are worried silly...

Another Barak-ism !! Make sure everyone hears what kind of speaker he is.

wow this is bad. Sorry if this is a repost

Here's an interesting exercise: do you see anything wrong with this statement from the NY Times? Mr. Wright, however, emerged from retirement in April and spoke at the National Press Club, offering deeper and broader criticism of the United States and using mocking language. Among other things, he opined that the United States government may have had a hand in creating the AIDS epidemic. Beldar does: This paragraph is one of the most egregious examples I've ever seen of lying by omission. What made Wright's comment so outrageous was not his suggestion that the government "had a hand in creating...

6:39 Mark 27:16 Forgets where he is again

Obama says 10K people died in Kansas...

Conservative bloggers and talk radio hosts have noticed the rash of gaffes — some goofy, some more serious — emanating from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama lately, but the mainstream media’s coverage of Obama’s bouts with foot-in-mouth disease has been sparse, to say the least. In the case of one of Obama’s more recent gaffes, however, a CNN reporter did Obama the favor of editing the gaffe right out of his story. On Monday, Obama weirdly talked about honoring the nation’s “unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience today.” In a report...

Presidential contender Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) rejected rival Senator John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) suggestion that the two of them make a joint visit to Iraq to assess the situation. “Anyone who wants to be president has got to have a first-hand view of the situation on the ground in Iraq,” McCain said. “Visiting the area, talking to the commanders, troops and Iraqi leaders is essential to understanding what’s going on.” McCain’s currently planned trip would be his 8th since the war began in 2003. Obama went to Iraq once, in 2006, and pronounced it a “a grievous mistake in which I...

For months, Barack Obama has had the image of an incandescent, golden-tongued Wundercandidate. That image may be fraying now. As smart and credentialed as he is, Sen. Obama is often an indifferent speaker without a teleprompter. He has large gaps in his knowledge base, and is just as likely to dig in and embrace a policy misstatement as abandon it. ABC reporter Jake Tapper calls him "a one-man gaffe machine." Take the Auschwitz flub, where Mr. Obama erroneously claimed last weekend in New Mexico that his uncle helped liberate the Nazi concentration camp. Reporters noted Mr. Obama's revised claim, that...

Conservative bloggers and talk radio hosts have noticed the rash of gaffes — some goofy, some more serious — emanating from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama lately, but the mainstream media’s coverage of Obama’s bouts with foot-in-mouth disease has been sparse, to say the least. In the case of one of Obama’s more recent gaffes, however, a CNN reporter did Obama the favor of editing the gaffe right out of his story. VIDEO On Monday, Obama weirdly talked about honoring the nation’s “unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience today.” In a...

In an interview yesterday with the San Francisco Chronicle, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi claimed the U.S. troop surge failed to accomplish its goal. She then partially credited the success of the troop surge to “the goodwill of the Iranians,” claiming that they were responsible for ending violence in the southern city of Basra. Asked if she saw any evidence of the surge’s positive impact on her May 17 trip to Iraq she responded: Well, the purpose of the surge was to provide a secure space, a time for the political change to occur to accomplish the reconciliation. That...

Republicans tried yesterday to jump on it as a question of Barack Obama's judgment. His campaign chalked it up to an innocent mistake. The latest gaffe in the presidential campaign started during a Memorial Day event in New Mexico, where Obama talked about his uncle being among the US troops who liberated the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. "And the story in our family was that when he came home, he just went up into the attic and he didn't leave the house for six months," Obama said. The veracity of the recollection started rebounding around the blogosphere, then yesterday,...