After telling Americans earlier this week to have their children learn Spanish, Sen. Barack Obama admitted yesterday, “I don’t speak a foreign language.”
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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 instruction in more languages than I’m willing to count. I did make it through Harvard’s “African Languages” list and counted 20 separate ones offered at Harvard.
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 speaking just English, Obama seems to have done pretty well for himself. After all, he is the frontrunner for President. I guess the lesson is that he’d be the frontrunner for Galactic Overlord if only he’d learned to speak Bahasa Indonesian, Spanish, and Klingon.
Obama should go to a black church in Compton and tell the congregation to teach their children Spanish. I bet that would go over well.
