The Barack Obama gaffe machine rolls on. At some point, ladies and gentlemen… The Drive-By Media out there saying, ‘You know, we gotta cut both these people, all three of these people some slack. I mean, it’s a long campaign out there. There are going to be misstatements. As many words as these people speak, why, they can’t possibly be expected to get everything right all the time. There are going to be slip-ups.’ Note that that is not something they extend to people like me who host radio talk shows. If they think we have made a mistake, it is front-page news and so forth. They just go on and on and on about it, never taking into account that we speak more in a week here than Obama does. Try 15 hours. So he’s a walking gaffe machine out there, and they say, ‘Yeah, you gotta cut these people some slack.’ No, no, no! At some point, doesn’t it make sense that somebody running for president should know some things, should have a basic understanding of American history? I realize based on some e-mail that I received yesterday that some of you people thought I was a little too harsh when discussing Obama’s relative ignorance about Memorial Day and other things. They just keep piling up. What this guy has — and this is a psychological problem, and somebody has written about it on a blog.
Let me see. Where was this written about? ‘Cause it’s exactly right. RedState.com, our old buddy Erick Erickson and his team: ‘A Pathological Need to be Part of History,’ and it’s true. Almost half of these gaffes that Obama makes involve a family member being involved in it somehow. Like Selma and his father getting over to the country because of the Kennedys, and now some relative raiding — what was it, Auschwitz? Well, no. Wherever he said it was, he got it wrong. But there is this need — and as Byron York points out, and I think this is an interesting observation, too. ‘Have you noticed,’ Byron York says, ‘that the only family members that Barack talks about are the white side of his family?’ His mother, his grandmother. We never hear about all the great heroes on his father’s side of the family. His father… There was one little, I think, reference to his father being so moved by the Kennedys or so moved by something that he came over here and found his mom and married her, but that turns out to be an exaggeration.’ This is Monday, Memorial Day. This is shortly after Obama just saw the dead. He’s giving a Memorial Day speech, fallen line, broken lane, breaking line of fallen heroes, (doing Obama impression) ‘some of whom I see here today.’ Some of whom I see here today! He also said this.
OBAMA: I had an uncle who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps, and the story in our family was is that when he came home he just went up into the attic and he didn’t leave the house for six months.
RUSH: Yeah, this was part of posttraumatic stress disorder. This is his motivating, inspiring, and uplifting Memorial Day speech. It was supposed to be a speech honoring the dead who have served this country, instead he tries to portray them all as a bunch of psychological nutcases. Anyway, he got it wrong. The Red Army, by the way the Russians — who at the time were our allies because they hated the Nazis; they despised them. You remember, George Patton radioed back to headquarters, said, ‘Ike? Omar? Let me head into Moscow and take care of these people now. We’re going to have hell to pay if we don’t.’ They wouldn’t let him go. And he turned out to be right. But after he finished off what he was doing in World War II with the Nazis, he wanted to head right over to Moscow and finish these guys off, and they said no. So it was the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz, and of course Obama’s uncle could not… Well, maybe… Who the hell knows? But anyway, gets home, is six months up in the attic because he was so distressed. Last Night, Lou Dobbs Tonight had this exchange with correspondent Candy Crowley.
DOBBS: Do you think somebody should create a petition to perhaps make certain that all of these candidates get enough sleep? Do you think that would be a good idea?
CROWLEY: Yeah. (giggles) Absolutely. I mean, y-you know listen, uh, w-when I talked to the campaign today, um, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, uh, obviously these are two very famous concentration camps, and they said he simply misspoke. But, as you mentioned, uh, between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, we have had a lot of sleep-deprived statements lately.
RUSH: Brent Bozell has a great piece on this. Let me read to you the opening of his column: ‘Imagine 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’ guy, Barack Obama. ‘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, Florida, Obama said, ‘How’s it going, Sunshine?’ He did the same thing in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 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.” The problem is ‘Obama’s home state of Illinois is more than ‘near’ Kentucky — it borders Kentucky.’ Arkansas dos not. ‘In Oregon…Obama said of his long campaign, ‘I’ve been in fifty-seven 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.’ It goes on and on to, you know, we get to the point here about the invasion of the concentration camp. Obama ‘talked about posttraumatic 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. [T]he prisoners at Auschwitz were liberated,’ as I said, ‘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).’ So he’s done this twice. It does get to the point here where we need to see that this guy’s got a fundamental psychological need to be part of history. The Selma example is a good one, too. Don’t we think these guys running for president ought to know something about their own country?