Been trying to post this for nearly half an hour, keep getting error after error after error.

After lurking for many years at Red State, reading this story prompted me to post for the first time.

These comments from Obama strike me the same way as his earlier false boasts about relatives of his liberating Auschwitz in World War II (you remember, the ones who served in Zhukov’s 5th Guards Tank Army???). Setting aside for a moment that the child of committed cultural leftists would even contemplate joining the military service so shortly after Vietnam, there is another problem with his story.

Obama claims that he had to sign up for the draft after he graduated high school in 1979. An interesting ‘recollection’ measure against the fact that President Ford, by Executive Order, had ended Selective Service registration in 1975.

In 1979, when The One graduated high school, there was no requirement to register for Selective Service. If he would have gone down to the post office in June of 1979 to register with Selective Service, people would have given him very strange looks. There would have no forms to fill out In fact, it is impossible for this ‘recollection’ from Obama to be true, because there was no Selective Service Registration in effect in 1979. Indeed, were this story true, Barack would have been the original ‘Army of One’ (or in this case, perhaps the ‘Army of The One’)

It was not until July 1980, in reaction to the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in December 1979, and he was feeling on the campaign trail about military unpreparedness, that President Carter reinstituted registration for Selective Service. The first men who were required to sign up did so on July 21, 1980 — more than a full year after Obama had left high school. At that time, Obama wasn’t even living in Hawaii, but rather was in Los Angeles studying at Occidental College.

In addition to the discrepancy of over a year on his timeline, another clue that this is a phony memory on his part is to examine the poltics of the time. I remember them well. I graduated high school in 1984, and remember quite well the debate about the resumption of registration. I tuned into politics at an early age, largely because a man originally from my hometown of Dixon, Illinois was running for President in 1980. Resuming registration for the draft was very controversial, and Carter only did it as a way of attempting to blunt Reagan’s effective charges that he was weak on defense issues. With the Vietnam-era draft still very vivid in people’s minds, there was a lot of resistance to this. Many young men talked openly of non-compliance, and by and large, were encouraged by liberals and anti-war types to not register. In fact,if memory serves me correctly, a few years later, the federal government had to add a proviso to student loans that disqualified an applicant from receiving them if a status check showed you had not registered with Selective Service.

Against this background, I find it highly unlikely that a young man like Obama, who had come from a background dominated by leftist figures, would have registered when Carter reinstated registration in July 1980. He would have likely had significant pressures from his family and peers to not do it. Instead, this seems like the stunt of a man who has seen polling numbers showing a surging McCain/Palin ticket, and who senses that he comes off as ‘Barack First’ after a week of Republicans discussing McCain’s lifetime example of ‘Country First’

Mr. Obama, I’m not buying it for a minute.