No, seriously. Twice, actually. While the rest of the dextrosphere was busy mocking my President for thinking Austrians speak “Austrian” rather than German, my first instinct was to assume there had been an error in translation. Maybe Obama had been quoted as saying this:

There’s a lot of — I don’t know what the term is in Austrian — wheeling and dealing, and people are pursuing their interests, and everybody has their own particular issues and their own particular politics.

but surely that actually meant he had said this:

There’s a lot of — I don’t know what the term is in Austria — wheeling and dealing, and people are pursuing their interests, and everybody has their own particular issues and their own particular politics.

only to have the Austrian reporter he was addressing mistakenly hear a final n that wasn’t really there. That would have made sense, I thought, given that it is common in the German language to use the names of nationalities and regions as a proxy for actual languages when discussing local dialects. While residing a year apiece in both Germany and Austria, I got asked all the time how one might say X “auf amerikanisch,” not from wise-asses who were trying to make some ironic point about the differences between British and American English, and certainly not from dumbasses who honestly did not know that the language we speak in America is, in fact, English, but from thoughtful and learned Germans and Austrians who were curious to know how our dialect differs from the one the Queen of England uses when she’s actually talking rather than handing our Presidents gifts that are even lamer than what they gave her. Given that linguistic subtlety, it stands to reason that any Austrian reporter who is one-tenth as Obasm-prone as his American counterpart would, upon hearing “I don’t know what the term is in Austria,” falsely hear that final n that would convert the entire quote to “Sure I know how to say it in High German, but I know you’re not from Hannover, so rather than demeaning you by addressing you in the wrong dialect, I’ll punt on the local term and wow you with the fact that unlike 99% of the rubes who elected me, I know that Austria isn’t part of Germany, let alone Australia!”

Alas, the audio proves my charity was unwarranted. He really did say “Austrian,” all right. Not in German, not in reference to a local dialect, and not in an ironic tone. He had actually made the very statement his detractors accused him of. Next time I’m remotely tempted to think President Articulate has said something insanely stupid, I promise not to give him the benefit of the doubt, but instead to conclude that he has, in fact, said something insanely stupid. Anything else is a losing bet.