So, Obama says that it’s embarrassing that Americans go to foreign countries and don’t know the language and yet he doesn’t know any languages??? How stupid is that?

“This is an example of some of the problems we get into when somebody attacks you for saying the truth, which is we should want children with more knowledge. We should want our children to have more skills. There’s nothing wrong with that! It’s a good thing,” he said.
While the Obama campaign says that Obama speaks a little bit of Indonesian, Obama himself admits that he isn’t bilingual.
“I know because I don’t speak a foreign language. It’s embarrassing!” he said.

Talk about arrogant! He hectors Americans about not speaking foreign languages and yet he doesn’t know any? He’s the one who was supposed to be this to be the first global president who has lived in foreign countries and yet he doesn’t speak any foreign languages? This is pretty indicative of his campaign: style over substance and hypocrisy.
BTW, here’s an article that confirms what I said about English being the lingua franca. We don’t need to learn a language when we go to other nations because the tourist locations make sure there are English speakers there to serve our needs.
I’m not against learning a foreign language, I understand the value of reading literature in it’s original language (you’d think that would be obvious since I’ve been taught Greek and Hebrew and it’s the reason I suggested to my teenager that she learn French), to converse with business partners in other lands (or the locals if you are going to be there for an extended time) or to converse with immigrants who come here and I’m not even an English only advocate but I think it’s pretty silly to hector people when you are one of the offenders. And I don’t think that a presidential candidate should be perpetuating stereotypes of Americans that are obviously not true (as the article I linked to notes).