Did someone say "Sieg"?


OK, so first you insult the devout Jewish by turning the Wailing Wall into a campaign poster, then you head straight for... Germany? Who's writing this guy's material? Hell, Letterman could use this guy.

So, next day, a whole slew of Leftist Germans showed up for Obama's Earth-shattering speech in Berlin. Judging from what I saw of the whole thing, I think there was a bigger swell in my glass of water when a bug landed in it.

So... let's sum it all up: first he backs down from his audacious attempt to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. Then he insults the Germans and other Europeans by the site he chose instead. Then he mumbles empty platitudes and starts talking heroically about halting the march of Communism (??)--something Barack's had a big problem doing in his own life (p.s. wasn't it Reagan who said "Mr Gorbachev, Tear down this Wall... ).

But...think about it: what else can you say when you are at the site of where the ruined East German Socialist economy rubbed up against booming Western Capitalism? What else do you say to people whose families were walled-in and or shot because otherwise there would have been no German left in the East save the godawful STASI?

Well, there is always the old adage that statesmen do not criticize their own country when they are overseas, right?

As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.

Well, maybe not...

But at least he opened up to all those misguided Germans. In the footsteps of Kennedy and Reagan, Obama stepped up to a crowd that would have made the Fuhrer proud and... lied his ass off. Don Surber does the fact-checking honors:

Beginning with getting wrong the bio of his father, Barack Obama Sr.

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama Jr. gave a speech in Berlin tonight and let me count the factual errors.

The first factual error to leap out was this:

At the height of the Cold War, my father decided, like so many others in the forgotten corners of the world, that his yearning - his dream - required the freedom and opportunity promised by the West. And so he wrote letter after letter to universities all across America until somebody, somewhere answered his prayer for a better life.

Um no.

Not hardly.

His father’s education had nothing to do with the Cold War, but everything to do with post-colonial African politics.

Wikipedia said:

Due to a program offering Western educational opportunities to outstanding Kenyan students that was organized by nationalist leader Tom Mboya, Obama Sr. was awarded a scholarship in economics, and at the age of 23 he enrolled at the University of Hawaii. He left behind a pregnant Kezia and their infant son.

I know what it is like to grow up without a father. I was 2 when my parents divorced and 47 before I met my father, Don Surber Sr.

So it is understandable that Democratic Sen. Barack Obama Jr. might not know much about his father.

But certainly the senator has heard of Wikipedia.

Next up was the very next paragraph:

That is why I’m here. And you are here because you too know that yearning. This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom. And you know that the only reason we stand here tonight is because men and women from both of our nations came together to work, and struggle, and sacrifice for that better life.

No, America and Germany hooked up not because of freedom, but rather a little thing called World War II. Germany tried to take over Europe. We helped stop the Germans and conquered Germany.

Berlin was pretty much rubble.

I do give him credit for getting the airlift right. An unpopular president defied his critics and stood tall against evil.

Next up:

The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil.

While there were a few foreigners among the 3,000 people who were murdered on 9/11, most of the victims were Americans. He left out the part where the hijackers were, like his father, foreign students in the USA. They trained in Florida as well.

Next up:

The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow.

15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. None were poor kids from Somalia. Osama bin Laden is the son of a wealthy Saudi contractor.

Next up:

The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.

What walls? France has replaced the aider and abetter of Hussein, Jacques Chirac, with L’Americain, Nikolas Sarkozy. For the first time, NATO is engaged in a mission outside of Europe as NATO fights in Afganistan. Obama’s worldview is stuck in 2002.

Next up:

That is why America cannot turn inward. That is why Europe cannot turn inward. America has no better partner than Europe. Now is the time to build new bridges across the globe as strong as the one that bound us across the Atlantic.

Again, factually in error and logically flawed. Bridges have been repaired and strengthened. France is thinking of returning to NATO militarily for the first time in 40+ years.

In fact, it is Obama who wants the USA to curl up in a ball like an armadillo and concentrate on throwing billions — if not trillions — on social welfare programs that repeatedly fail. Poverty in Somalia is last on the Obaman agenda.

Next up:

This is the moment when we must renew the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love.

The Cuban missile crisis was too close. But it happened once. Not often. The Berlin Wall’s construction came because the Soviets judged correctly that a novice president was weak on foreign policy. This led to the Cuban confrontation as Kennedy finally stood up.

By the way, in other venues, Obama has called Kennedy’s embargo of Cuba a failure. It succeeded in isolating a very real threat to national security — without throwing one bomb.

Finally:

And despite past differences, this is the moment when the world should support the millions of Iraqis who seek to rebuild their lives, even as we pass responsibility to the Iraqi government and finally bring this war to a close.

Obama wanted to abandon Iraq by March 31, 2008.

It will be interesting to see if FactCheck.org or anyone else fact-checks this speech.

All that money, expense, wall to wall press coverage... and the O-minghty loses 4 points to McCain?? What a trip!

UPDATE: Allah finds more trouble lurking in O-land, even over at The New Republic:

The quote’s buried near the end of an otherwise silly TNR piece speculating that the media might be about to, ahem, turn on Barack Obama. After reading it, I can’t decide if the takeaway is (1) that the press is a bunch of whiny, self-entitled five-year-olds, per the comically overwrought reactions from Adam Nagourney and the reporters Obama ditched to meet with Hillary, (2) that TNR, which published a similar piece about Hillary last year, has an odd fondness for stories about journalists loathing the politicians they have to cover (“The difference is the Clinton people were hostile for no reason”), or (3) that Obama and his team really are arrogant, secretive jackasses paranoid to a provocative degree about St. Barack’s personal life. In the interests of partisan advantage, I duly declare number three to be our winner. Money:

Much of this is certainly the run-of-the-mill complaining of campaign reporters who can’t get enough access. Still, the campaign hasn’t helped itself, approaching reporters with a sense of entitlement. “They’re an arrogant operation. Young and arrogant,” one reporter covering the campaign says. “They don’t believe in transparency with their own campaign,” another says.

Reporters who have covered Obama’s biography or his problems with certain voter blocs have been challenged the most aggressively. “They’re terrified of people poking around Obama’s life,” one reporter says. “The whole Obama narrative is built around this narrative that Obama and David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it’s not entirely true. So they have to be protective of the crown jewels.” Another reporter notes that, during the last year, Obama’s old friends and Harvard classmates were requested not to talk to the press without permission.

As tensions escalate, the risk to Obama, of course, is that reporters will be emboldened to challenge his campaign ever more aggressively.

So absurd is that last line, three months out from the election with Obama clinging to a small lead despite the media’s best efforts, that I’m inclined to dismiss the whole piece as counterprogramming for McCain’s “Love” ad. As it is, given the way innocuous details about him have metastasized, I don’t much blame them for not cooperating on biographical pieces. The irony is, if they have nothing to hide then the secrecy’s probably hurting them by fostering suspicions that could otherwise easily be debunked. Read this NBC “Deep Background” piece about Obama’s “senior thesis” at Columbia on Soviet nuclear disarmament. Sounds innocent enough — until you learn that his spokesman won’t even discuss what happened to Obama’s copy of it. Smart thinkin’. Let the investigation begin!

Love that word. "Terrified". Andrea Mitchell just might have been onto something.



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