Obama gaffes, tall stories pile up

Barack Obama, the leading Democratic presidential contender, has begun to pile up gaffes and tall stories like he was a--God forbid--a Clinton or something.

He was the commencement speaker at graduation ceremonies Sunday at Wesleyan University. He more or less repeated his wife Michelle's mantra about public service--foregoing the big bucks in a productive private sector job--to do public service. He lionized Ted Kennedy, who has yet to earn his first private enterprise dollar in his life. He lionized 1950s and 1960s era civil rights agitators in the South. He recommended the job corps, peace corps, Americorps, working as he did as an organizer of poor folks in the ghetto, teaching--he went on and on, ad nauseaum.

Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, he never did mention military service. What more honorable, sacrificial public service could a young person possibly perform, than serving in the U.S. military?

Then Obama gave a Memorial Day speech at a cemetary yesterday, and regaled the crowd with how his uncle serving at Auchwitz during World War II liberated the facility and saved millions of Jews. It all began to fall apart, as first, it was discovered that the Russians liberated Auchwitz, not the Americans. Then it came out that Obama's mother was an only child and his father's family are all in Kenya--who was this mysterious uncle? It took a full 24 hours for the Obama campaign to sheepishly issue a press release that the Senator had misspoken, and that it was a great uncle, who served in some obscure little town in Germany, but no where near Auchwitz.

The longer things drag on, the more Obama's thin resume and inexperience start to show. As a Republican, I can only hope that he can hang on until he's actually the nominee, so John McCain gets a really good shot at him.