Posted on 04/19/2008 12:53:35 AM PDT by Heuristic Hiker
At a fundraiser in San Francisco, Ca., Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., claimed he had more world experience than his rivals, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and introduced a new bit of biographical information.
"Foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain," Obama said, according to the Huffington Post.
"It's ironic because this is supposedly the place where experience is most needed to be Commander-in-Chief. Experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world. This I know. When Senator Clinton brags 'I've met leaders from eighty countries' -- I know what those trips are like! I've been on them. You go from the airport to the embassy. There's a group of children who do native dance. You meet with the CIA station chief and the embassy and they give you a briefing. You go take a tour of a plant that [with] the assistance of USAID has started something. And then -- you go."
"You do that in eighty countries," Obama said, "You don't know those eighty countries. So when I speak about having lived in Indonesia for four years, having family that is impoverished in small villages in Africa --knowing the leaders is not important -- what I know is the people...I traveled to Pakistan when I was in college -- I knew what Sunni and Shia was [sic] before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee."
This last part -- a college trip to Pakistan -- was news to many of us who have been following the race closely. And it was odd that we hadn't hear about it before, given all the talk of Pakistan during this campaign.
So I asked the Obama campaign for more information.
Apparently, according to the Obama campaign, In 1981 -- the year Obama transferred from Occidental College to Columbia University -- Obama visited his mother and sister Maya in Indonesia. After that visit, Obama traveled to Pakistan with a friend from college whose family was from there. The Obama campaign says Obama was in Pakistan for about three weeks, staying with his friend's family in Karachi and also visiting Hyderabad in Southern India.
- jpt
But I'm sure Obama's trip was completely innocent...that he exercised the same stellar judgement in picking out people there to meet and greet as he has here in picking out his role models (Jeremny Wright),political passage mentors (Bill Ayers) and land deal advisors (Antoin "Tony" Rezko).
Ouch. He should be called Dumbama.
I seem to recall John McCain spending a little bit of time overseas.
Reminds me of Bill’s trip to Moscow during his college days, about which we still don’t know where he got the money for the trip. What’s suspicious to me, is that one cannot travel easily between Pakistan and India. How did Barack get from Karachi to Hyderabad?
Barack Hussein visited family in Indonesia and friends in Pakistan. I wonder who his friends were - Pakistan was flooded with close to 2 million Afghan refugees, Iran was in the depths of Mullah induced madness, Iraq was trying to build The Bomb, and the World was waking up to the start of the 3rd Muslim expansion.
I wonder how much he's helped his relatives over there. I bet he hasn't given them even ten percent of what he's given that racist preacher.
That was nothing. All he did was stay at a hotel for six years. It was even a Hilton.
No wonder he is so casual about saying he will invade Pakistan.
This Obama guy is full o crap!
Obama’s *foreign experience* is about as shallow as he is. He doesn’t even have enough experience to handle normal questioning as a candidate for the presidency. I am still amazed that such a person is even a serious candidate.
3 weeks in Pakistan visiting relatives and he’s an expert on foreign policy? Hahahahahahah....still more exageration from a chronic braggart.
Obama’s College Trip to Pakistan...
b. HUSSEIN also spent time in a madrassah.....
this is the a-hole, the lib/dems want in the White House and to negotiate with the muzzie terrorists!!!
Maybe he went for some extra training.
Right, Bill’s trip was to cold war ENEMY USSR while Pakistan has been a USA ally for many years, base in Peshawar etc.
How to get from Karachi to Hyderabad? Airplane?
Yeah but he was there as part of the US war machine, killing little children and cutting off the heads of farmers. McCain wasn't there to understand the peaceful peasants but to murder them just like America murdered the Japanese and the Africans and the Indians. McCain is the typical white American and is incapable of understanding because his racism and hatred is ingrained in him as it is in all white Americans. /sarc
What's funny is Obama and Democrats in general think the fact that Obama has family that are impoverished foreigners and he knew the difference between Shiites and Sunni as a child are positives for him. Dems truly do not understand their own country.
That is putting it mildly
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