You had to know that someone over at Malkin's Hot Air would manage to take offense when Barack Obama promoted bi-lingualism. I guess it was Special Ed's day at the races:

Barack Obama addressed the issue of official languages yesterday by endorsing one: Spanish. Instead of worrying about immigrants learning English, he told an audience, America should be teaching its children Spanish. Every child should be bilingual, Obama said, but listen to the language he chooses later:

It’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beaucoup,

Well, which is it — should we teach them Spanish or French? Maybe we should teach them Chinese, or perhaps Arabic. Immigrants come from around the world to live in America. Perhaps Obama doesn’t realize this, but they don’t all speak Spanish. If our children have to learn foreign languages so that immigrants feel at home here, then we’d better plan on keeping them in school for about 30 years.

Also, Obama’s argument here makes no sense. He’s complaining that Americans don’t speak the native language when we visit Europe, but that we don’t speak the immigrant language when people move to the United States. With that argument, shouldn’t we expect Europeans to speak English when we travel there?

Yeah, hunh? Hunh?

Oh jeez. Here is what Obama said with emphasis on what Ed skimmed over:

You know, I don't understand when people are going around worrying about, "We need to have English- only." They want to pass a law, "We want English-only."

Now, I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But understand this. Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English -- they'll learn English -- you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about, how can your child become bilingual? We should have every child speaking more than one language.

You know, it's embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and all we can say [is], "Merci beaucoup." Right?

You know, no, I'm serious about this. We should understand that our young people, if you have a foreign language, that is a powerful tool to get a job. You are so much more employable. You can be part of international business. So we should be emphasizing foreign languages in our schools from an early age, because children will actually learn a foreign language easier when they're 5, or 6, or 7 than when they're 46, like me.

Later in his post Ed concedes that Obama is correct about the value of learning a second language (Sez Ed: "...I studied Irish for several years.") but that is long after he has made his point to the average Malkin reader (for whom Murican is the only language if one includes the sub-dialect: "Y'all") and who has the attention span of a hummingbird on meth. And so, to elaborate on an old European Joke:

A person who speaks three languages is tri-lingual
A person who speaks two languages is bi-lingual
A person who speaks one language is American
...and a person who willfully misinterprets them all is Special Ed.

N'est-ce pas?