Barack Obama, Gaffe Factory

If Dan Quayle were dead he'd be rolling in his grave. The left made a laughingstock out of him for misspelling 'potato' with an 'e' (once an acceptable spelling of that word) and implied that Quayle was a moron, a dummy, and unfit for office.

Well what does that make Barack Obama then?

Here is a guy who thinks there are 58 states in the union. He thinks Arkansas is closer to Illinois than Kentucky. He can't tell the difference between Sioux Falls and Sioux City. He can't tell the difference between Sunshine and Sunrise.

Here is a guy who, when he visited Hanford, Washington, said

Here’s something that you will rarely hear from a politician, and that is that I’m not familiar with the Hanford, uuuuhh, site, so I don’t know exactly what’s going on there. (Applause.) Now, having said that, I promise you I’ll learn about it by the time I leave here on the ride back to the airport.

Wow. And the crowd applauded him! Here's the kicker, Obama voted on funding for the Hanford facility.

His latest slew of gaffes are truly frightening, however, because they show just how dangerous and conflicted his misunderstanding of foreign policy is.

Jake Tapper:

On Thursday Obama told the Orlando Sentinel that he would meet with Chavez and "one of the obvious high priorities in my talks with President Hugo Chavez would be the fermentation of anti-American sentiment in Latin America, his support of FARC in Colombia and other issues he would want to talk about."

OK, so a strong declaration that Chavez is supporting FARC, which Obama intends to push him on.

But then on Friday he said any government supporting FARC should be isolated.

"We will shine a light on any support for the FARC that comes from neighboring governments," he said in a speech in Miami. "This behavior must be exposed to international condemnation, regional isolation, and - if need be - strong sanctions. It must not stand."

So he will meet with the leader of a country he simultaneously says should be isolated? Huh?

This on the heels of Obama being torn between figuring out whether Iran is a tiny country posing no threat to the U.S., or a grave threat (perhaps this merely depends upon which audience he is pandering to at any given moment. But if he can't figure out that these contradictions will invariably emerge, that doesn't say much about his intelligence or ability to learn from experience either).

These are gaffes that would embarass a fifth-grader. It is just shocking that anyone would want to entrust our foreign policy to this lighter-than-air diletant. We can afford on-the-job training in foreign policy with a guy like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush because they came equipped with solid principles to guide them and a policy that always puts America first. Barack Obama, on the other hand, has been contaminated by the Marxist nonsense of Black Liberation Theology, is steeped in blame-America-first leftism, and sees nothing wrong with befriending a terrorist like Bill Ayers.

Is it any wonder he has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to foreign policy? The guy doesn't have enough sense to pick the right friends, and apparently is too dense to identify our enemies.

Update: A foreign policy gaffe? Why, that's not a bug, it's a feature:

Before the Democratic debate of July 23, Barack Obama had never expounded upon the wisdom of meeting, without precondition, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hugo Chávez, Kim Jong Il or the Castro brothers. But in that debate, he was asked about doing exactly that. Unprepared, he said sure -- then got fancy, declaring the Bush administration's refusal to do so not just "ridiculous" but "a disgrace."

After that, there was no going back. So he doubled down. What started as a gaffe became policy. By now, it has become doctrine. Yet it remains today what it was on the day he blurted it out: an absurdity.