Barack Obama, Crack Military Historian

“Chlorine itself historically has not been listed as a chemical weapon,” Mr. Obama said today when discussing Syria walking all over the many red lines his administration has placed in front of it.

No, really. Wait’ll Mr. Obama discovers that little internecine scrum we like to call World War I. Moe Lane theorizes what the befuddled gaffe-prone semi-retired president likely meant:

What Barack Obama probably meant to say is that chlorine gas is too useful in too many industrial processes to be successfully banned as a chemical weapon. Unfortunately, President Obama is that worst of public speakers: which is to say, a bad one who has been told once too often that he’s a good one. So it goes.

Moe also advises that said befuddled gaffe-prone semi-retired president fire the staffer who wrote the above quote. But it has a nice symmetry, doesn’t it? Mr. Obama’s second term play-acting at being president was kicked off by not noticing or caring that speechwriter Jon Favreau* had inserted the dreaded Chamberlain-esque phrase “peace in our time” into his inauguration speech, nicely foreshadowing the International horrors to come under his watch. If the president and his young staffers don’t know basic World War II history, who would expect them to know a detail of WWI that a fifth grader should know?

(Not that Mr. Obama, the self-proclaimed “constitutional law professor” knows a whole lot about American history either: recall in 2011 when he declared, “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, you know, for historic reasons,” which would certainly be news to Lyndon Johnson, John Connally, and Ann Richards.)

* Pictured here on the front lines of the Democrats’ infamous war on women.

Update:

pic added MT @gabrielmalor: Obama says “Chlorine itself, historically, has not been listed as a chemical weapon.” pic.twitter.com/oCRX8gDUiR

— Political Math (@politicalmath) May 14, 2015

And tomorrow’s headlines today!

Vox: “Here’s 20 uses of chlorine that show it’s perfectly harmless” @charlescwcooke

— Holden (@Holden114) May 14, 2015

Flashback: Past performance, no guarantee, etc.:

Awwwwwkward RT @morgenr In 2006, Obama called chlorine plants in the U.S. “stationary weapons of mass destruction” http://t.co/HD0Uk4KFxu

— Matt (@Matthops82) May 15, 2015