By now you've seen the footage of Barack Obama ruing the fact that he hasn't been able to visit all 57 states in this great union of ours. If you haven't, scroll down a bit and read Goldfarb's post on the matter. I'll wait.

This faux pas is beyond weird; I know the guy is tired, but “How many states are there in America?” is the kind of question they ask you at the hospital after you've had a seizure to see if your brain is still working. I speak from personal experience on this matter, by the way. When I had a random seizure in 1996, the guy at the emergency room asked me how many states there were and then who was president. I responded with a ten minute rant on Whitewater - he urgently ordered up more tests.

But I digress. What I'm trying to say is there is no way Obama could have been so disoriented as to have even momentarily forgotten that we have but 50 states. Besides, there was something about Obama’s additions to the Union that rang a bell. Then I remembered - Grand Strategist (and likely Obama supporter) Thomas P.M. Barnett in his seminal work “The Pentagon’s New Map” urged America to add several states to the nation, perhaps as many as a dozen.

Has Obama absorbed such expansionist designs to such an extent that he's already counting his proverbial new chickens before they’ve hatched? Is he planning on adopting Canada? Perhaps he only has his eyes on the cool parts of Canada like Montreal and Toronto, and will let the remainder of our northern neighbor peacefully tend to its hockey playing and curling. And what of our neighbors to the south? Will we find ourselves in an Obama administration forced to refer to Haiti as Really South Dakota?

Regardless, I'm shocked that Obama apparently believes in a hyper-muscular 21st century version of Manifest Destiny. Truly, I didn't see that one coming.