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| Home Front: Politix |
| Obama's speech "stubbornly passionless" |
| 2010-06-16 |
| Tunku Varadarajan, Daily Beast On Tuesday night, we saw the debut of a new oratorical exercise, one that may, in the short term—though, mercifully, without Nancy Pelosi seated in the background—come to rival the State of the Union (SOTU) address. Let us call it the State of the Oil Spill, or SOTOS. Listening to the inaugural SOTOS, as brimming with bromides as the Gulf of Mexico is brimming with crude oil, one was struck by how passionless the president is. Don't get me wrong, passion is no substitute for action; and on its own, passion is empty theater. But one was struck by how Barack Obama continues to place peculiarly stubborn trust in his actuarial side—you know, the side that was once described as “cerebral,' but which is now capable of little better than a litany of facts and figures.... Obama has a plan: “BP will pay.' Of course it will: It is legally obliged to. Did we need a president to tell us so, at prime time? But Obama has a civilizational point to make. In the opening of his address, right after al Qaeda, he spoke of the oil spill “assaulting' our shores. In language redolent of the neocon fighting words of yore, directed against Islamist terrorism, he intoned that “We will fight this spill with everything we've got for as long as it takes,' to “make sure that a catastrophe like this never happens again.' On the edge of my seat, I was waiting for the punch line: You're either against this oil spill, or with it. It never came. Instead, we got the rinky-dink green tub-thump against “America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels'; and the rinky-dink chest-puff that asserted that “The time to enhance a clean-energy future is now.' And don't forget those “energy-efficient windows' that Obama talked about in reverent tones, windows the president would like all of us to have...lest we defenestrate ourselves in a state of oil-crazed madness. That is, unless we “seize the moment' and “rally together and act as one nation.' Whee! |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #2 So what am I supposed to do Barry, bolt a windmill to my truck? |
| Posted by: Jefferson 2010-06-16 16:02 |
| #1 I could not bring myself to listen to Obumble's speech. I heard that it was Jimmah Carter's "malaise" speech all over again. Obama is going to care for a 20 billion dollare "escrow" fund? Are they kidding? Obama cannot watch money, but he can overspend other people's money in a hurry. |
| Posted by: whatadeal 2010-06-16 15:29 |