Obama’s Berlin Speech Fact Checked

Don Surber noticed a lot of oopsies.

I didn’t even realize it was possible to fact check a vague and fatuous motivational speech filled with gauzy platitudes, but Surber manages quite well.

Tom Maguire in the comments brings up my favorite:

How about his third paragraph?

I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city. The journey that led me here is improbable. My mother was born in the heartland of America, but my father grew up herding goats in Kenya.

Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, Colin Powell and Condi Rice have all spoken in Berlin.

Maybe he looked different because he was riding a goat?

C’mon – The One was at best The Fifth, except in his own imagination.

Maybe he was talking about his humongous ears?

Seriously though, leave it to the “post racial” candidate to bring up his race again. Obama never misses an opportunity to pull out that race card, does he?

Groan.

UPDATE:

The crowd size has been fact-checked, too.

Also, in case you haven’t yet seen it, Gerard Baker chronicles the ‘Lightworker’s’ life in biblical verse. Funny stuff. (Thanks Geezer).

UPDATE II:

Geezer also sends this excellent commentary on the Obamamania, here and abroad, from a Canadian citizen in davidwarrenonline. Here it is in part:

Has anyone noticed the speeches are full of ludicrous non sequiturs? Consider this prize:“The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil.”

Interesting point, though I’d heard it before. What comes next?

“As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.”

Interesting if true, as they say. But what is the connexion?

“People of Berlin! People of the world! This is our moment! This is our time!”

According to the experts at Newsweek, and numerous other MSM outlets, this is a phrase we will be hearing for many years. It will go down in the history videos with John F. Kennedy’s, “Ich bin ein Berliner!” (when he unintentionally identified himself with the popular German pork and veal sausage); or Ronald Reagan’s, “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!”

Indeed, this was the week when CNN’s on-air discussion of whether the media were “in love with Obama” was interrupted by a breaking news flash: Senator Obama’s airplane had just landed safely in Jerusalem!

And the week when Investor’s Business Daily did a little digging to calculate that cash contributions from “mainstream” journalists were going to Obama and McCain, respectively, in the ratio of approximately 100-to-1. (Can you guess, just from watching, which candidate receives the 100?)

It is summer. Then comes the fall. We cannot yet know how the U.S. presidential campaign will unfold, and the party conventions have not even been held yet. But we can know that we are witnessing a deeply disturbing spectacle.

Germans should be quite disturbed by the spectacle of a demagogue who communicates with the public almost exclusively through mass rallies. Americans should be disturbed by what should disturb the Germans.

 

 Thanks Geezer, good read.