We all know the difference between normal mistakes and those that hint at a deeper, more frightening problem, such as Alzheimer's or other brain conditions.  In light of this, how do you interpret a shocking mistake recently made by Barack Obama?  Writes Terry Jeffrey of CNS News:

In two campaign speeches over the last two days, President Barack Obama has twice mistakenly mentioned "my sons" when defending his administration's regulation requiring virtually all health-care plans in the United States to provide women, without any fees or co-pay, with sterilizations and all Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptives, including those that can cause abortions.

Given that Obama has, ostensibly, only daughters, where does such a mistake come from?  And how do you make it twice on two different occasions without correcting yourself?  Then again, how can an American president say, "I've now been in 57 states, I think - one left to go" without correcting himself?  Yes, Obama's most recent bizarre slip of the mind makes me think of that older, equally bizarre one.  I mean, there are mistakes.

Then there are mistakes.

After all, it's ingrained in every American child when extremely little that our nation has 50 states.  Fifty states, fifty states, fifty states, fifty states....  It should just roll off the tongue - in just the way the word "daughters" should when girls are all you've ever had.

Of course, this invites the quip - and it's a good example of how there's some truth behind every joke - that "American child" never described Obama, at least not in spirit.  But another possibility suggests itself:

Is Barack Obama brain-damaged?

I'm not just being a wise-guy.  With the president's admitted past drug use and the recent revelations about how he was a member of the "Choom Gang" in high school, is it hard to imagine that he might have damaged his mind through the abuse of recreational drugs?

"Choom," by the way, is slang for smoking marijuana.  And it seems that this gang activity was Obama's favorite extra-curricular option in high school.  Writes ABC News' Jonathan Karl:

In his 1995 memoir "Dreams of My Father," Obama writes about smoking pot almost like Dr. Seuss wrote about eating green eggs and ham.  As a high school kid, Obama wrote, he would smoke "in a white classmate's sparkling new van," he would smoke "in the dorm room of some brother" and he would smoke "on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids."

He would smoke it here and there.  He would smoke it anywhere.

Yes, I do like it, Uncle Scam I am.  In fact, as the Choom Gang story goes, Obama would start "pot-smoking trends," veritable Nikola Tesla of weed use that he was.  Add to this a diversity in drug inclinations that led him to dabble also in hard drugs, and perhaps it explains the soft head.

Of course, as for calling girls "sons," there are other explanations.  Perhaps Obama is like those parents who don't want to sex stereotype their children and thus are very pleased when their son dresses as a girl; maybe he'll now refer to Malia and Sasha as sons half the time.  Perhaps he subscribes to the fashionable LBGT idea that "gender' is all a matter of perception.  Heck, apparently he already believes that one's ideology and economic model needn't have a relationship to reality.

Then, American Thinker editor Thomas Lifson theorizes that the explanation may be that Obama is hiding more than just a sordid past, writing:

It has never occurred to me that Barack Obama might have a second secret family, as Charles Kurault did, hidden from his first family (pardon the pun) and the general public.  I still find this hard to believe.

But what kind of brain freeze or derangement leads someone to refer to my sons, when two daughters are the only fruit of conception one has created?

Perhaps the freeze symptomatic of a fried brain?

Then again, Dr. Lifson could be right.  Maybe Obama had more of a reason than we think to say that if he had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. 

All joking aside, the only thing we can know for sure about Obama is that he's a very bizarre man.  He had an absentee father, and, in his high-school yearbook, he acknowledged a drug dealer but not his quasi-absentee mother.  He seems to have received more ideology than love, as he was mentored by communist-party member Frank Marshall Davis, was drawn to Marxist professors in college and ran on both the Democratic and the socialist New Party line in the 1990s.  And when you consider this, it's not surprising that he turned to drugs during adolescence: it's what kids with troubled upbringings often do.

As to this, C.S. Lewis once wrote something very profound about the significance of upbringing:

No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.  Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.  I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that "a gentleman does not cheat", than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.

It's hard to know for sure how scarred, in mind and soul, Obama is as a result of his bizarre youth.  But should we continue to take the chance of letting him play America's hand? 

                                                         Contact Selwyn Duke