MICKEY KAUS: “According to Rasmussen, voters reject Obama’s Scarsdale Bien Pensant Dinner Party Lecture about bilingualism by, oh, 83% to 13%.”

UPDATE: Barack Obama’s four languages. I don’t think there’s any scandal here. I could, with some plausibility, claim three languages besides English, but in fact couldn’t carry on a conversation in any of them without some tooling-up time. What German I had (my dad taught at Heidelberg when I was a kid) is completely gone, when I was in Mexico a few years ago I could function somewhat in Spanish but awfully marginally considering how many years I studied it, and, well — who ever carries on a conversation in Latin, anyway? But I couldn’t do so if called upon; I doubt I could translate Caesar on the Gallic Wars, as they made us do in high school. And by “doubt” I mean I’m aware that there’s no possibility. . . . This is a problem for Americans with foreign languages in general — English works so well in so many places that it’s hard to stay tooled up.