McCain Beats Obama Bloody Without Even Having To Lift A (North Vietnamese Torturer Broken) Hand -- Will Obama Save Himself From Himself?

[Obama spokesman Dan] Pfeiffer said. "It's extraordinary that someone who wants to be our president and our commander in chief doesn't know how to send an e-mail."
Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by "extraordinary." The reason he doesn't send email is that he can't use a keyboard because of the relentless beatings he received from the Viet Cong in service to our country. From the Boston Globe (March 4, 2000):

McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain's severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain's encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He's an avid fan - Ted Williams is his hero - but he can't raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.

Jonah Goldberg at The Corner on National Review discussing this foolish advertisement by Barack Obama.



There is plenty of evidence in the Goldberg post that McCain does use the internet but because of his injuries his wife does the typing for him.  He uses the internet with the mouse.

What makes it really bad is that when you attack a man for not using the internet or being able to send an Email because of injuries he sustained in the service of the country couldn't you at least spend 5 minutes on Google for the real story like many bloggers have done?  Who looks the fool now, Barack!

I hate to do this, but alas, not all is lost for team Obama.  Today is a perfect time for Obama’s own Sister Soulja moment. He could order that computer ad pulled, apologize directly for having placed it.

Considering how foolish and hateful it makes him seem and how much it distracts from the message in the second half it was a tactical mistake as well as a strategic mistake.

Reclaim the mantle of change and ‘new politics’ and only put ads on that proclaim what he will do. If he does it now he may be early enough to make McCains ads look petty if Obama never responds with anything but positive, “I will,” messages.

He would be locked in though — no negative replies at all.

That would be as bold a move as Palin was for McCain — for that reason he wont do it. He can’t face the screaming of the left and media.  The critters at Kos, DU, and the other fever swamps of the left have been demanding that Obama hit back and hit hard.


The flailing by team Obama is really beginning to show.  It's time a grown up stepped in to run that thing.  Remember, this is what he considers executive experience that qualifies him to be President.
DKK

Update: Ace notes that Forbes Magazine noted McCain’s disability in 2000, too:

In certain ways, McCain was a natural Web candidate. Chairman of the Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee and regarded as the U.S. Senate’s savviest technologist, McCain is an inveterate devotee of email. His nightly ritual is to read his email together with his wife, Cindy. The injuries he incurred as a Vietnam POW make it painful for McCain to type. Instead, he dictates responses that his wife types on a laptop. “She’s a whiz on the keyboard, and I’m so laborious,” McCain admits.

Time And Factcheck Puff Up Obama's Air Pressure Claims -- Unfortunately They Need To Check Their Assumptions, They Are Half Full!

Barack Obama's suggestion that we can't drill our way out of the current energy shortage, but we can solve the problem through tire inflation, has been the source of much hilarity. We did the math here, and found that it would take approximately 11,308 years of tire inflation to equal the energy we can obtain by developing our own petroleum resources.

Now, remarkably, Time magazine has rushed to the defense of its candidate, arguing that "Obama is right."

The author of the article, Michael Grunwald, mixes apple-and-orange statistics to try to create the false impression that there is more to be gained by inflating tires than through offshore drilling:

The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day by 2030. We use about 20 million bbl. per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now. Meanwhile, efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points. In other words: Obama is right.

Grunwald is trying, through sleight of hand, to conceal certain basic facts: Obama said that tire inflation could save energy equal to "all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling,"

(...)

That's right: the EIA, writing in early 2007, assumed that oil prices would decline from their 2006 peak; that in 2008, the price of crude oil would be around $60 a barrel; that it would continue to decline until around 2013 to a low of about $50 a barrel; and that the price would then gradually increase to a little under $60 a barrel by 2030. Those were the assumptions on which EIA concluded that it would not be economically profitable to get most OCS oil out of the ground.

Earth to Michael Grunwald: that isn't what happened. The EIA was wrong. Currently crude oil is at around $120 per barrel, not $60. At the elevated prices we are now experiencing and are expected to experience in the future, vastly greater quantities of OCS oil (or ANWR oil, or shale oil) can profitably be exploited, and those resources can make a vastly greater contribution to our economic well-being.

When we read wildly inaccurate reporting in the mainstream media, it's often hard to tell whether the reporter is incompetent, or is deliberately trying to deceive. You can make your own guess. For now, suffice it to say that Time's attempt to rehabilitate Obama's tire-inflation gaffe is a failure.

To repeat what McCain and I have both said, great -- fill up your tires!  But we are still going to need the energy!  Obama's claim has nothing to do with an energy plan and does not discount the need to drill.
DKK
Powerline Blog -- Time Tries To Salvage Obama's Gaffe

UPDATE -- HUGE OPPORTUNITY FOR MCCAIN -- Knowing What He Knows Now Obama Would Still Oppose Surge -- All In For Defeat I Guess

Update:  This could be a HUGE opportunity for McCain!

McCain is comfortable making jokes about his age, how about this one:

"Wow, I though the old guy was supposed to be stuck in his ways in spite of the evidence.  Next Obama will be telling us to get off his lawn and turn that damn music down!"

Well, this presents McCain with an opportunity to frame Obama for the rest of the campaign as a staid, inflexible fool who can't seem to understand that the world doesn't revolve around his failed, inflexible policies!  It also covers McCain for changing his mind on drilling.

It hits at the premise that judgment is not just riding one decision 6 years ago but one has to have the wisdom to adjust to the changing world!
---------------------------------- End Update ------------------------------------



Special Report reported on the question asked to Obama.  His answer was useless but basically said he would still oppose the surge.  See if you can make sense of it:


Via Redlasso

Huh?
DKK

Update -- here is the text of the exchange:

Q: If you had to do it over again, knowing what you know now, would you support the surge?
A: No, because, keep in mind that…
Q: You wouldn’t?
A: Keep in mind… These kinds of hypotheticals are very difficult. Hindsight is 20/20. But I think that, what I’m absolutely convinced of, is that at that time we had to change the political debate because the view of the Bush administration at that time was one that I just disagreed with.

DKK

Additional -- Obama wouldn't be able to go sans flak jacket if it weren't for the surge.
DKK

Is Our Obama Learning -- Barack Fails Presidential Math

"(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. . . ."

That would be the vaunted Barack Obama describing why he is on his Rainbow Tour.

He would do better to spend a few days studying the constitution and brushing up on his math so he can recall the length of a President's term, the maximum terms allowed, and how many years that is total(hint: 4 and 2 -- you do the math).

Maybe he can get the 58 states he campaigned in for the primary to repeal 22nd amendment!
DKK
Via -- Instapundit

(The title is a riff on President Bush's, "is our children learning," gaffe -- after all he is soooo stupid, according to the left -- but Barack seems to be matching him when it comes to gaffes)

History According To Obama -- Or Liberties With The Truth?

GUANTANAMO VS. NUREMBERG. "In short, the procedural protections afforded the Guantanamo detainees under the statute before the Supreme Court in Boumediene . . . substantially exceed those accorded the Nuremberg defendants. Obama's unfavorable comparison of the legal treatment of the Guantanamo detainees with that of the Nuremberg defendants suggests either that he does not know what he's talking about, or that he feels free to take great liberties with the truth."

DKK
Instapundit

Hey, Is There A Manual For This Thing?

When Obama held his second press conference late last week to address his ever more slippery position on withdrawing troops from Iraq, he stated:

"I am absolutely committed to ending the war," the longtime community organizer declared. "I will call my Joint Chiefs of Staff in and give them a new assignment and that is to end the war."

Barnett explains well the role of Joint Chefs as a staff unit, which provides advice to the commander-in-chief. In order to avoid conflicts within their respective services and provide clear advice, the joint chiefs are by law excluded from the command structure. The command structure (what is called the "line" part of the organization in corporate organizations) consists of people like General Petraeus, who actually run the military organization through its structure of commands. Barnett comments sarcastically:

Surely Obama knows this. Obviously he wouldn't be seeking the role of Commander-in-Chief without knowing how the job is done.

DKK
American Thinker Blog -- Obama's lack of understanding exposed again

The Duce You Say -- It Was Just A Movie!

He did express curiosity about the filming of a chase scene in “North by Northwest,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint that included a death-defying scramble over Rushmore’s presidential faces.

“How did they get up there in the first place?” he asked ranger Wesley Jensen.

“They didn’t. It was a movie set,” Jensen told him.

(...)

How many times did Quayle misspell potato before the American media and popular culture proclaimed him an idiot? We can add this to Obama’s existing list of gaffes and blunders:

• The Selma March in 1965 did not contribute to his birth in 1961.
• Kansas tornadoes in May 2007 killed 12 people, not “ten thousand”.
• Afghans do not speak Arabic.
• Misunderstanding Memorial Day, and then claiming to see “fallen heroes” in the Memorial Day audience.
• Same day: putting Auschwitz in western Germany, not Poland.
• “57 states”.

• 
  

DKK
Ed Morrissey -- Hot Air -- One potatoe, two potatoe, three potatoe, four

Gaffes When He Speaks From The Heart

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."
(...)
Over the years, reporters have tagged a long list of conservative public figures, from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, as dim and uninformed. The reputation of some of these men has improved over time. But can anyone name a leading liberal figure who has developed a similar media reputation, even though the likes of Al Gore, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have committed substantial gaffes at times? No reporter I've talked to has come up with a solid example.

Read the list and why they were gaffes! It makes you wonder if he really has core beliefs?
DKK
WSJ -- The Obama Gaffe Machine

That Obama Gaffe

Okay, so we have supposedly learned that it was Obama's Great Uncle that liberated a sub-section of Buchenwald, not an uncle at Auschwitz. But if sources are correct and unless there's some arcane military history in his favor, Obama still has a problem.

His only Great Uncle is Charles W. Payne. It at least appears that no one by that name from Kansas served in the Army during WWII.

Charles W. Payne of Kansas, with a similar birth era, served in the Navy during WWII.

Riehl World View -- A New Problem For Obama

I have no idea how accurate the sources for this post are, but if they are accurate then it means that this story was either a family myth or was really embellished.

Of course, since he used a similar story about his grandfather in a previous speech that he has on his website:

My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain. I don't oppose all wars.

Strange he didn't mention his uncle then.
DKK