Geography - not Obama's strong point
It seems that POTUS Obama is having a little trouble with his world map.
At the recent Americas summit in Colombia he managed to fail by naming the Falkland Islands as the Maldives. Now he was probably going to try and name them the Malvinas, which is still wrong and is just appeasing the Argentines.
Either the teleprompter wasn't working or he caught a case of Bush-itis.
Or maybe he just saw Hilary dancing instead.
In the land of the blind, the one-arm man is king.
I imagine it happened just as you described: in Latin America, he tried to appease the locals by saying "Malvinas", and slipped and used the term that was more familiar to him, "Maldives".
Now, selling out an ally by saying "Malvinas" is one thing. The slip of the tongue, though, is the kind of thing that happens to everybody. I think way too much gets made out of it when it happens to politicians. I'm no fan of George W. Bush, but I think that he got picked on too much for this kind of thing.
As has been pointed out numerous times before, the POTUS is probably the most recorded individual. Every time they say something in public it is noted. How many times has any of us mixed up a country or a person's name etc? It's a wonder he doesn't balls things up more often. That said, Bush was a Marx Bros-esque comic genius and gift to topical comedians the world over. He seemed to have some form of spoken dyslexia.
Our former taoiseach seems to have been prone to similar gaffes:
"The reason it's on the rise is because probably the boom times are getting even more boomer."
"That decision will in history be written as the biggest mistake that American administration ever made, because Lehmans was a world investment bank. They had testicles everywhere."
"It took Ireland 30 years to become an overnight success."
"I never condemn wrongdoing in any area."
"They believe that a number of operations which took place during 2004, not just the Northern Bank Robbery, were the work of the PSNI and would have had the sanction of the Army Council and be known to the political leadership." (He named the PSNI, the Northern Irish Police, instead of the IRA)
"I don't think it helps people to start throwing white elephants and red herring at each other."
Bush the Lesser mangled the English language at a pace close to Yogi Berra or Ringo Starr. Everyone has gaffs at times, even Reagan, JFK & FDR but Bush was in another league. His Dad was prone to a higher than normal number of mistakes but W was really a very frequent screwup.
Obama also once referred to the U.S. as having 57 states. Everyone says something dumb now and then... but his predecessor was indeed the champ of presidential misstatements!
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