Say, Al Sharpton: if Herman Cain lacks "intelligence" for colloquially referring to "Cuban" as a language, how about Barack Obama . . . who did precisely the same thing when it came to "Austrian"?
On his MSNBC show tonight, Sharpton mocked Cain for asking in an aside while munching on a Cuban delicacy during a campaign stop: "how do you say 'delicious' in Cuban?" Does Sharpton not know that Barack Obama, in a much more formal setting, addressing a NATO audience, said something virtually identical, wondering how a certain phrase was said "in Austrian"? Video after the jump.
AL SHARPTON: Herman Cain was in Miami today. And Herman Cain did it again. I didn't think he could, but he did. He talked about freeing Cuba. Now we all know he's had challenges in foreign policy. Let me show you this.
Cut to a clip of Cain at a campaign event, munching on a Cuban delicacy. A man in the crowd explains it's called "croquetta."
HERMAN CAIN: Croquetta. How do you say delicious in Cuban?
SHARPTON: I mean, how do we, how do Americans take this as a serious process, when you see people like these people. I mean, what are we really, really talking about? In some ways, it's almost making a mockery of the process. I'm clearly not in the Republican side of the train of thinking, but I know some very intelligent Republicans. We try to argue and debate in an intelligent way. This is a mockery of Republicans that have some intelligence and know how to run a campaign.
Here's Obama [YouTube], in that speech to a NATO audience: "It was also interesting to see that political interaction in Europe is not that different from the United States Senate. There's a lot of, uh, I don't know what the term is in Austrian: wheeling and dealing."
