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| Home Front: Politix |
| Mark Steyn: Obama's surrender |
| 2008-05-04 |
| National Review Four score and seven years ago… No, wait, my mistake. Two score and seven or eight days ago, Barack Obama gave the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address, or FDR’s First Inaugural, or JFK’s religion speech, or (if like Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books, you find those comparisons drearily obvious) Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860. And, of course, the Senator’s speech does share one quality with Cooper Union, Gettysburg, the FDR Inaugural, Henry V at Agincourt, Socrates’s Apology, etc: It’s history. He said, apropos the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, that “I could no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother.” But last week he did disown him. So, great-speech-wise, it’s a bit like Churchill promising to fight them on the beaches and never surrender, and then surrendering a month and a half later, and on a beach he decided not to fight on. . . . Go read it all. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #9 But you're not a clueless one.... |
| Posted by: Pappy 2008-05-04 22:11 |
| #8 :-) I'm a picky asshole |
| Posted by: Frank G 2008-05-04 20:18 |
| #7 RD, I think you're mistaken. There's an "h" in Rhetorical. Other than that? Good to go. ~;) thankee knindily Mr. Frank.. ... miy splling leeves luch tode emagination! |
| Posted by: RD 2008-05-04 20:15 |
| #6 RD, I think you're mistaken. There's an "h" in Rhetorical. Other than that? Good to go. |
| Posted by: Frank G 2008-05-04 18:06 |
| #5 Obama's run for the Presidency may show that he has no friends, Somewhere floating around in the murky depths of my so-called memory is a saying, 'The President HAS no "friends". Unable to tag it with a date, place, or time, just a bump in the fog. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2008-05-04 17:58 |
| #4 ... apropos the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, that “I could no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother.” But last week he did disown him. So, great-speech-wise, it’s a bit like Churchill promising to fight them on the beaches and never surrender, and then surrendering a month and a half later, and on a beach he decided not to fight on. . . . It was never a great speech. It was a simulacrum [sic An unreal or vague semblance] of a great speech written to flatter gullible pundits into hailing it as the real deal. It should be “required reading in classrooms,” said Bob Herbert in the New York Times; it was “extraordinary” and “rhetorical magic,” said Joe Klein in Time - which gets closer to the truth: As with most “magic,” it was merely a trick of redirection. Obama appeared to have made Jeremiah Wright vanish into thin air, but it turned out he was just under the heavily draped table waiting to pop up again. The speech was designed to take a very specific problem — the fact that Barack Obama, the Great Uniter, had sat in the pews of a neo-segregationist huckster for 20 years — and generalize it into some grand meditation on race in America. Senator Obama looked America in the face and said: Who ya gonna believe? My “rhetorical magic” or your lyin’ eyes? That’s an easy choice for the swooning bobbysoxers of the media. With less impressionable types, such as voters, Senator Obama is having a tougher time. The Philly speech is emblematic of his most pressing problem: the gap — indeed, full-sized canyon — that’s opening up between the rhetorical magic and the reality. That’s the difference between a simulacrum and a genuinely great speech. The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama’s adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the Senator’s speechifying “magic” came from Jeremiah Wright himself. “He’s a politician,” said the Reverend. “He says what he has to say as a politician… He does what politicians do.” Obama = a Retorical Gas-Bag. [period] |
| Posted by: RD 2008-05-04 14:54 |
| #3 Obama's run for the Presidency may show that he has no friends, only cooperatives and 'ingrates'! |
| Posted by: smn 2008-05-04 14:22 |
| #2 excise the 'cancer'! Harsh words for a man who was Obama's pastor and spiritual mentor for a couple decades. The operative word being 'was', apparently. Any bets on whether Obama dumps his Weatherman friends in the near future? |
| Posted by: SteveS 2008-05-04 14:03 |
| #1 The 'first' speech by Obama was a grace saving way for Rev. Wright to 'meld quietly into the background'! Since he didn't accept the 'hint' and thus STFU, Obama had no choice but to excise the 'cancer'! |
| Posted by: smn 2008-05-04 13:50 |