GAFFE OR ILLUSION? - AT 8:15 A.M. ET:  The mainstream media has told us, endlessly, how smart our president is.  How intellectual.  How deep.  How worldly.  How educated.  How..well, unlike BUSH (!!).

So when Obama said we have 57 states, it was shrugged off.  They speak Austrian in Austria, he said.  Shrugged off.  He sat in a radical church for 20 years and didn't know what the pastor believed.  Hey, his brilliant mind was elsewhere.

But wait a minute.  Get this latest whopper.  In what apparently is an almost comic attempt to do more groveling to Muslims, the president of the United States and its associated territories has now declared us one of the largest Muslim countries in the world:

Now, the flip side is I think that the United States and the West generally, we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam. And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslims Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.

As my old mentor, Johnny Carson, used to say, "I did not know that."

The Weekly Standard examines the president's high scholarship:

Surely President Obama is smarter and more worldly than the last White House occupant, but there are not 57 states in the Union -- and if there were, the United States would still not be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. Eight million Muslims seems to be at the high end of estimates of America's Muslim community. That number barely puts the United States in the top 40. There are more Muslims in tiny Jordan than there are in the United States, and twice as many in Syria.

And, more important...

Obama is undertaking a very significant reorientation of American foreign policy, and one hopes that he isn't doing so on the very mistaken belief that the United States is one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. Actually, if you look at the number of Jewish Americans, we'd be the largest Jewish country in the world after Israel. And America is the largest Christian country in the world. This context might be useful to the president as he tries to help the Muslim world better understand the United States.

And that, of course, is the point.  The president, with his "multicultural" origins and left-wing background in Chicago, is part of the crowd that demands that we "understand" other cultures.  But he never seems to demand that they understand us.  But he doesn't like us much, anyway.

Does the term "potential disaster" cross your mind?

June 3, 2009