Where did this guy grow up?
Paul K. writes:
At a recent prayer breakfast, the alien-in-chief honored Navy Corpsman Christian Brossard, twice pronouncing corpsman “corpse-man.”
Video here.
This is what happens when we elect as president someone who has never watched a John Wayne movie.
LA replies:
You’ve got to be kidding.
I know you’re not, but I had to say it, just to show that even I would not have imagined that Obama is that much of an alien. I mean, it’s inconceivable. Surely he doesn’t call the Marine Corps “the Marine Corpse.” However, maybe the mispronunciation is not from ignorance, but is deliberate, like his bowing to non-Western leaders, his disrespectful treatment of the British PM and the Queen, and many other things.
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Rick U. writes:
What happened to the “most brilliant orator” of our time? Can you imagine the furor in the MSM if Bush made the same mispronunciation?
LA replies:
As I will write in a post later today, there’s someone who actually thinks Obama is “brilliant”: Bill O’Reilly. And because O’Reilly thinks Obama’s handling of KSM issue is extremely “stupid,” he can’t make sense of it. How could a brilliant man do such a stupid thing?
O’Reilly is so uninsightful that he constructs his argument not just out of one, but out of two manifestly false premises: (1) that Obama is brilliant, and (2) that Obama’s terrible acts proceed from well intentioned mistakes, rather than from ideology.
We all know O’Sullivan’s (or Conquest’s) Law: any institution not explicitly conservative turns liberal over time. Well, here is Lawrence’s Law: Any putative conservative who explains the ruinous acts of leftists as the result of “foolishness,” “stupidity,” “mistakes,” and “blunders” rather than of leftism, is a liberal, not a conservative.
A liberal, as we know, sees no enemies to his left. So a person who describes a leftist as someone who is merely “making mistakes” has revealed himself as a liberal. He doesn’t have it in him to identify leftism as leftism and oppose it as such.
Now O’Reilly, I believe, does not call himself a conservative. I think he sees himself as a non-ideological centrist. But many conservatives, most of the entire mainstream conservative opinion apparatus, persist in describing Obama’s terrible acts as “mistakes,” “blunders, “shotting himself in the foot,” rather than the acts of an leftist acting in a leftist manner.
Paul K. writes:
I doubt there was any deliberate disrespect in Obama’s mispronunciation, because the he had already identified the “corpse-man” in question as “an American of Haitian descent,” and thus of course worthy of our respect.
The gaffe is especially ironic considering that Obama went to considerable effort to learn to salute properly, so as not to embarrass himself like Clinton. This came out about two weeks ago. From Politico:
Obama’s evolution as commander-in-chief Sat, 23 Jan 2010
Never a soldier himself, but suddenly their commander-in-chief, President Barack Obama wanted to learn the job from the ground up.
Including the salute.
Under the guidance of an expert, aides say Obama privately repeated his salute over and over again until he got it down. In a testament to how sensitive the White House is about the commander in chief practicing this basic military gesture, aides would not say who taught Obama how to salute. But every time he uses it, Obama is trying to convey an insider’s respect for the armed forces without saying a word.
“That attention to detail, that focus on the outward manifestation of what we expect, is compelling,” said retired Gen. Paul Eaton, who advised Obama during the presidential campaign. “Whoever worked with him on that did a pretty good job.”
So he learned to salute but not how to say corpsman. On the other hand, he reflexively refers to “the Holy Quran” like one born to it.
From the transcript of Obama’s remarks: :
One such translator was an American of Haitian descent, representative of the extraordinary work that our men and women in uniform do all around the world—Navy Corpsman Christian [sic] Brossard. And lying on a gurney aboard the USNS Comfort, a woman asked Christopher: “Where do you come from? What country? After my operation,” she said, “I will pray for that country.” And in Creole, Corpsman Brossard responded, “Etazini.” The United States of America. God’s grace, and the compassion and decency of the American people is expressed through the men and women like Corpsman Brossard.
The author of the blog OneSTDV writes:
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems Obama revels in every opportunity to showcase his ability to speak in a foreign language. And, of course, he always does it with a “perfect” accent and pronunciation. I recall during his speech to Muslims at the onset of Ramadan, he did the same thing with several phrases in Arabic.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 05, 2010 01:32 PM | Send