Friday, August 24, 2012

General? Admiral? What's the difference

The president's rebuttal is typical but the glaringly obvious is that the man has absolutely no idea of who or what he represents as commander in chief. If the people involved are not in his immediate orbit of supporters and political advisers, they are just background noise and backdrop to this president and it shows. 
Barack Obama has always been known for his silken words, soaring rhetoric and ability to use language to his advantage.
Lately, however, the president seems to be losing command of the details. In a speech at a fundraiser in New York on Wednesday night, he took aim at Todd Akin, the political punch bag du jour on both sides of the political aisle.
‘Recently, some of you have been paying attention to the commentary of the Senator of Missouri, Mr Akin, who - the interesting thing here is that this is an individual who sits on the House Committee on Science and Technology, but somehow missed science class.
U.S. Navy Adm. William McRaven
President Barack Obama arrives at JFK International Airport
Slip up: President Obama, pictured arriving at New York's JFK Airport yesterday, right, accidentally said that William McRaven, left, was a general, when in fact, he is an admiral

In town: The president is in the East Coast city to raise funds for his re-election campaign
In town: The president is in the East Coast city to raise funds for his re-election campaign
‘It's representative of a desire to go backwards instead of forwards, and to fight fights that we thought were settled twenty, thirty years ago.’
The problem is, Akin is a congressman who is running for a US Senate seat in Missouri. Senator Claire McCaskill, Obama’s favourite Senator until a few months ago when she started to distance herself from him in an effort to win re-election, might not particularly appreciate the President having conceded her seat already.
 
Then there was the stop at Sloopy’s bar on the campus of Ohio State University where Obama posed will students to spell out the four letters in Ohio. Except that, initially at least, the President and the student on his right got their letters wrong, spelling: ‘O-I-H-O’
Perhaps most seriously, however, was Obama’s slip in an interview with KSDK in St Louis, Missouri when he was asked about the new 22-minute film ‘Dishonorable Disclosures’ by a group of former Special Forces troops and intelligence operatives.
‘I won't take this film too seriously,’ he responded. ‘I gather that one of the producers is a birther who still doesn't think I was born in this country.
Know your place: William McRaven is and admiral not a general. As a SEAL, he is member of the US Navy, not US Army or US Marines
Know your place: William McRaven is and admiral not a general. As a SEAL, he is member of the US Navy, not US Army or US Marines
‘You've got one who was a candidate, a Republican candidate for office. And a proud card carrying member of the Tea Party. So this is obviously a partisan film. 
‘I'd advise that you talk to General McRaven, who's in charge of our Special Ops. I think he has a point of view in terms of how deeply 
I care about what these folks do each and every day to protect our freedom.’
The difficulty with this is that William McRaven is and admiral not a general. As a SEAL, he is member of the US Navy, not US Army or US Marines.
Obama has made mistakes with military terminology before. In February 2010, he mispronounced ‘corpsman’ – as ‘corpse-man’ instead of ‘core-man’ several times.
Last year, he mixed up two Medal of Honor recipients, saying that ‘Jared Monti, was the first person who I was able to award the Medal of Honour to who actually came back and wasn’t receiving it posthumously’.

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