Media Snoozes While Obama's 'Altered States' Gaffes Continue

Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters posted Saturday on Barack Obama's tirade against Fox News.

The underlying report by Ryan Alessi of McClatchy's Lexington Herald-Leader also contained this nugget (HT National Review' Online's Media Blog), showing that the candidate's basic geography challenges continue:

Obama conceded that he has a steep challenge to get his message and background to voters in states such as Kentucky — where he trails Sen. Hillary Clinton by 27 points, according to a poll published earlier this week — and West Virginia, where voters chose Clinton over Obama by 40 points on Tuesday.

"What it says is that I'm not very well known in that part of the country," Obama said. "Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it's not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle."

Trouble is, as a look at a US map (with territories) shows, Arkansas may be "nearby," but Obama's home state of Illinois is "adjacent":

Greg Polliwitz at NRO's Media Blog asks:

Can the man who wants to be President please tell us why Arkansas is somehow closer to Kentucky than Illinois??????

This gaffe comes on the heels of Obama's "state"-ment of May 9 that "I've been in 57 states, (with) I think one left to go."

As I noted last week (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), during the 1992 campaign, Vice President Dan Quayle was pilloried from June until Election Day over his misspelling of a word.

I would suggest that Quayle's error is "small potatoes" compared to the stunning geographic ignorance that is becoming a routine occurrence with Obama.

Clearly, Old Media disagrees. A Google News search on "nearby state of Arkansas" (in quotes) came back with three results. Two of them are Alessi's report. The other is at the American Thinker blog.

Perhaps, in addition to Jeremiah Wright and Obama's wife Michelle, the candidate and his campaign will demand that geography be made an off-limits topic.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.