The significance of the entire episode isn't that it has permanently offended 1.5 billion Muslims, or pandered to some millions of Jews in the U.S. and abroad. It's that Obama is a smug but incompetent neophyte on foreign policy matters who can't manage to avoid a major diplomatic gaffe, even when he's reading from a prepared text that presumably was vetted in advance by his foreign policy experts.

I see what you are saying. So let's go beyond McCain's singing career.

As president, he would have to deal with the war in Iraq that Bush bumbled into. McCain does not seem to know the difference between Shia & Sunni. He needs Lieberman to whisper the Cliff's Notes into his ear when discussing the situation in the middle east. He equates walking through a market in Iraq wearing Kevlar, surrounded by Marines with attack helicopters covering him from above with strolling down a street in Indiana.

You don't think that level of ignorance might get someone killed?

I'm not talking about the diplomatic gaffe that offends people. I'm talking about the diplomatic gaffe that kills people.

Obama cited Kennedy's meeting with Kruschev as defense of "I'll talk to anyone without preconditions". What Obama misses is that that talk was a major contributor to the cuban missle crisis (arguably the closest the world ever got to an all out nuclear exchange). Korea and Gulf War 1 were started because the words used, when processed through the diplomatic filters, were interpreted as an invitation to attack a neighbor without US reprisal. Obama is showing repeatedly that he doesn't have the experience to know where the verbal minefields are and doesn't have enough self discipline to keep silent when he is speaking from ignorance.

The most dangerous thing is not the hawk president who know what war is, but the dove president who is clueless and causes us to stumble into the war.

How much more could Obama do with an untrained mind guiding his tongue.

As opposed to McCain's singing about bombing Iran?

That did not offend a few Muslims?

But that does raise a question for those who get a thrill from the fresh breeze of the Obama candidacy. Given Obama's continued display of a basic understanding of US diplomatic history (e.g. his defense of talking to enemies based on FDR and Kennedy), what happens if he is elected and starts making these sorts of gaffes as leader of the free world.

I can think of at least two conflicts (Korea and first gulf war) that a very plausible argument can be made were started by diplomatic misspeak. How much more could Obama do with an untrained mind guiding his tongue.

Also amusing: Bisharat is quoted, without comment, at little green footballs under the headline “Barack Obama Has Offended Billions of Muslims.” I was under the impression that offending Muslims was a good thing in LGF-land? Sure enough, it took until the 21st comment to get: “If there ever was a religion that needed offending it’s Islam.”

I never go into the comments of LGF. The site is actually quite good that way. Why go looking for offensive stuff in uncontrolled content?

Wishful thinking gets beaten up by reality most of the time. The reality here is that US foreign policy is continuous, across administrations, with occasion shifts in direction (like Nixon in China). It's never revolutionary because the thinking that leads to policies is generally based on facts. Facts do not have party affiliation.