Obama Speaks Only One Language
07/12/2008
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After telling Americans earlier this week to have their children learn Spanish, Sen. Barack Obama admitted yesterday, "I don't speak a foreign language."

Upon learning this news, New York Times op-edster Roger Cohen, who has written dozens of columns about how Barack Obama is the perfect postnational cosmopolite Citizen of the World, committed suicide in despair, his hopes and fantasies shattered.

Obama lacks a second language despite living for four years at an impressionable age in a foreign country and then spending eight years at a lavish prep school that currently offers five different languages and makes studying at least one of them mandatory in 7th grade. Sen. Obama also has an undergraduate degree from Columbia University, which has a foreign language requirement and offers 37 different foreign languages, including some that don't exist anymore, such as Akkadian. He later spent three years at Harvard, which offers more instruction in more languages than I can count, including 19 languages indigenous to Africa alone. So, Obama has had more opportunity to learn a foreign language than 95% of all native-born Americans, but he hasn't.

And, yet, despite only speaking English, Obama seems to have done pretty well for himself. After all, he is the frontrunner for the Presidency. I guess he'd be the frontrunner for Galactic Overlord if only he'd learned to speak Bahasa Indonesian, Spanish, and Klingon.
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