Opinion: Recent Obama Gaffes Raise Serious Questions of Judgment, with Update

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UPDATE: The Obama campaign has just released a statement claiming the concentration camp in question his uncle helped liberate was Buchenwald, not Auschwitz.

I first reported on the Obama gaffe vis-a-vis Bush and Hugo Chavez in this OpEd.

In short, Obama blamed President Bush for the rise to power of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Chavez was first elected president in 1998, during Bill Clinton's presidency.

He went on to blame Bush for the growing Venezuela-Iran-Hezbollah relationship.

How could Bush have intervened?

Diplomacy?

Chavez called Bush Satan at the UN, and has been antagonistic with a number of Latin and South American leaders, particularly President Uribe of Columbia, whom he has threatened with war.

It has also been revealed that Chavez has had a working relationship with FARC for many years. And now he has a relationship with Iran and Hezbollah.

How do you disrupt that relationship short of sanctions or war?

No answers from Obama.

Just complaints, and unfounded ones at that. Chavez was fast becoming a problem long before Bush took office.

And oh yeah, Jimmy Carter helped keep Chavez there in 2004, endorsing the election despite rampant claims of fraud.

Who's to blame again?

Gaffe #2. Yesterday, during a Memorial Day speech in New Mexico, Obama said the following:

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.

He sees fallen heroes in the audience?

He sees ghosts?

Here's the YouTube video.

A slip of the tongue perhaps, but what would have been the result in the press had Bush made that gaffe? It would have been a bloody massacre!

Obama then engages in a 'Town Hall' Q & A which doesn't praise veterans for their brave and selfless service, as would be apropos for the occasion, but to portray them as victims callously cast aside by the Bush Administration:

We're going to have hundreds of thousands of new veterans coming in, many of them who suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. They are not being diagnosed quickly enough, they're not getting the services that they need quickly enough.

And, sadly, the group of veterans that are probably being most neglected in this area are women veterans. We've got to do a better job of creating facilities...

(APPLAUSE)

... specifically for women veterans.

And part of what we need is to recognize that oftentimes our women servicemembers are more prone to post-traumatic stress disorder partly because they -- there's a sad, but real, problem of sexual harassment and sexual abuse for women veterans, and that makes them much more prone, then, to have post-traumatic stress disorder.

Whether any or all of that is true or not, the holiday set aside for remembrance of our fallen heroes, and those who sacrifice greatly today, is the time to remember that heroism and sacrifice, not to politicize it. He has 364 other days in the year to do that.

Memorial Day is the day to honor our Veterans, not victimize them for sheer political gain.

How about a couple stories of Medal of Honor winners like Sergeant Alvin York, Audie Murphy or even Navy Seal Lt. Michael Murphy?

No. It's all about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and sexual harassment and abuse

Gaffe #3. The Washington Post has quoted Obama as follows:

"In World War II we didn't have the concept of post-traumatic stress syndrome. People had to basically handle it on their own," (Obama) said.

Referring to an uncle who had been one of the first U.S. troops into Auschwitz, the concentration camp, Obama said: "The story in the family is he came home and just went up in the attic."

On the same subject, from CBS:

Obama also spoke about his uncle, who was part of the American brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz. He said the family legend is that, upon returning from war, his uncle spent six months in an attic.

“Now obviously, something had really affected him deeply, but at that time there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain,” Obama said.

“That’s why this idea of making sure that every single veteran, when they are discharged, are screened for post-traumatic stress disorder and given the mental health services that they need – that’s why it’s so important.”

For clarification, the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland was liberated by the Russian Red Army on January 27, 1945.

So, in effect, Obama uses his uncle, who supposedly liberated Auschwitz and was so disturbed by what he saw he 'just went up into the attic' as the means to politicize Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in a Memorial Day speech.

Let's break it down:

1. He blames Bush for Hugo Chavez' rise to power, when that rise to power took place in 1998 when Bill Clinton was President.

2. He sees dead people in the audience, then uses those dead people as political fodder.

3. His uncle was part of the brigade that liberated Auschwitz, which would put his uncle in the Red Army, not Patton's.

In and of themselves, these are the type of gaffes all POTUS candidates get hammered for in every election.

But when you throw in his questionable judgment with regard to Jeremiah Wright, unrepentant Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Tony Rezko, former terror fundraiser Hatem el-Hady, his campaign staffer who resigned for his talks with Hamas, and his apparent low-level conversations with FARC, you really have to ask yourself:

Just who the hell is Barack Obama?

Where's his head really at?

And what does he really stand for?

First he'll negotiate with Ahmedinejad and Chavez without preconditions.

Then he won't when he gets bad press about it.

He talks tough on FARC, yet this was found on the laptop computer of slain FARC terrorist Raul Reyes after Columbia's cross-border raid to get him:

6. The gringos will ask for an appointment with the minister to solicit him to communicate to us his interest in discussing these topics.

They say that the new president of their country will be Obama and that they are interested in your compatriots. Obama will not support "Plan Colombia" nor will he sign the TLC (Colombian Free Trade agreement).

Here we responded that we are interested in relations with all governments in equality of conditions and that in the case of the US it is required a public pronouncement expressing their interest in talking with the FARC given their eternal war against us.

And oh yeah, 10,000 people died in a tornado in Kansas, one of our 57 states.

The actual counts are twelve dead and fifty states, last I checked

I'm staring to get a really bad feeling about putting this guy in the White House.

Even SniperGate doesn't look so bad right now.

For the record, I was seriously considering voting for Obama three months ago.

As of now, this is one typical white person he can officially cross off his list.

And it has absolutely nothing to do with race.

Unles you count the presidential race, that is.