JFK earned the right to stand at Brandenburg gate and say Ich bin ein Berliner. He fought in the war that brought Hitler down, was already elected President when he went there, and his views of the Soviet Union and its east European Empire were public record.

Likewise Reagan, was already President and had made his position clear months before Telling Gorbachev to tear down this wall.

Obama has every right to visit there and make a speech, use it as a backdrop for his campaign, whatever, but to so and insinuate he’s already one of the big boys with a cocky kind of statement to jerk himself closer to the center? Thats just a tad shakey.

You make an assumption based on a non-sequitur, which is, Obama is unfit for the presidency because of the location of his speech where he addresses Germany. This is one of your main points to support your article’s thesis that some how the location of the speech is a huge gaffe/political blunder/example of inept leadership. This is an arguement that makes zero sense. It almost seems as if you were grasping at straws.

Second, it seems that Obama’s Iraq policy positions are being adopted by the criminal Bush and his cabal; certainly, our ally the Iraqi PM endorsed Obama’s position on withdrawal; and today, he solidified his position with our Israeli allies.

Finally, even McSame is heeding Obama’s call for concern about the situation in Afghanistan and the destabilizing of the Pakistani tribal region that our “ally” Musharaff gave control, as well as billions of our taxdollars, to the Taliban. The crinimal Bush said, in an alarming and rare moment of honesty, that if we’re attacked again it will likely be from this region. Intriguing that Bush would say this; at first blush, it is a tacit admission of failure in his ill-fated attempt to put Benizir Bhutto back into Pakistan and the resulting chaos that this incredible lack of judgement (hello, Dr. Rice?) wrought.

And you say that Obama giving a speech in front of a historical marker shows a lack of “a grasp of various historical facts about specific countries”? Have you listened to McSame try to tell Katie Couric that the surge brought about the Anbar awakening? How he then talks about had we not surged, Sheik Abu Risha would have been executed despite the fact that he was, in fact, executed! McSame is so out of touch on the most important issue to his campaign that he can’t even get the basic chronology of the centerpiece of his bid for president correct.

Maybe you need to re-think that opposition to Obama’s hawkishness on Pakistan. Obama has been pretty much right on all of these issues, and the criminal Bush may have left us no other choice!