Posted on 02/16/2008 4:28:28 AM PST by rhema
These days, Obama worshippers file two kinds of columns. The first school is well-represented by Ezra Klein, the elderly bobby-soxer of The American Prospect:
"Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair."
Er, OK, if you say so.
It seems to me that Barack Obama is the triumph of flesh, color and despair over word that's to say, he offers an appealing embodiment of identity politics plus a ludicrously despairing vision of contemporary America (sample: "Trade deals like NAFTA ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart") that triumphs over anything so prosaic as a policy platform.
On the other hand, if you're running for president not as an unexceptional first-term senator with a thin resume but as the new Messiah, the new Kennedy, the new Gandhi, the new Martin Luther King, you can't blame folks for leaping ahead to the next stage in the mythic narrative. Around the world, a second instant subgenre has sprung up in which commentators speculate how long it will be before some deranged Christian-fundamentalist neo-Nazi gun-nut deprives America of its fleeting wisp of glory. Setting a new standard for fevered, slavering Obama assassination porn, Earl MacRae warned Canadians in The Ottawa Sun:
(Excerpt) Read more at ocregister.com ...
Hah. They’ll vote for any change, except for a change that leaves us with change in our pockets.
OP: "Clearly the one thing this writer Steyn quotes would..."
;)
That would be, “We U.S. Americans...”
Obama should be much more concerned about Arkancide. Hillary will stop at nothing, and I do mean nothing.
Barack Obama is a shoo-in merely because potential critics fear being labeled a racist for challenging him in any way, shape or form.
Even if one is brave enough to proclaim that the emperor has no clothes, the truth of his statements will be drowned out by cacophonic shouts of "Hate!"
Ping
I suspect that much of the left would rather see their candidate martyred then in office pursuing his agenda and alienating most of the country as a result. Martyrs are more useful.
I have to say I fear Obamamania because they may indeed have enough numbers to elect this idiot, but it’s also starting to give me the creeps. Really scary how many idiots we have in this country that can go absolutely ga, ga, loop de loop over someone that is completely unexceptional. Now I understand in 2004 they all got behind Kerry because they didn’t have a choice, but they didn’t go nuts over the man. As little as Kerry has done over the years, even he is more exceptional than Obama.
"Right now Obama's more at risk of being taken out by traces of polonium-210 left in his hotel by a Clinton operative than by Roy Rogers saddling up for Jesus." - Mark Steyn
Insightful analysis that shows also which party is more in tune with its (insane) grass roots and which is more enslaved by a decrepit, self-serving leadership. (Hint: The folks who go for new faces are not the self-serving ones)
Try to imagine this woman in the Senate when President Obama gives his first State of The Union address.
You're about to take a trans-Atlantic flight on a very stormy night. You may get on any one of three planes. Respectively, they are flown by:
a) A black dude three years out of flight school;
b) A chick seven years out of flight school whose husband was one of the worst pilots in the history of aviation and who got caught banging the stews and then lied about it and lost his license to fly;
c) An old white guy of about 70 who has been flying since he was a kid.
Which plane do you get on? If you get on the black dude's plane because he is "charismatic" I say, "Mazeltov". The white chick who previously co-piloted a disaster?
I'm sure it's politically incorrect, but most of us are flying with the old white dude. The media is, as always, talking only to itself.
I agree with you that the line you quoted was the star of the piece.
Best Steyn line today. 2nd best the gaseous Sesame Street platitudes.
One prof I had in the UCLA English department told us he’d never give any of us an A on a paper unless he wished he had written it.
Steyn makes me feel that way so often with his writing!
This is the one that took my breath away:
“Setting a new standard for fevered, slavering Obama assassination porn, Earl MacRae warned Canadians in The Ottawa Sun:”
{sleezy quote deleted}
Awww! Ezra has a man-crush.
Steyn nails it again.
Discredited, and that is further down the road to Marxist, socialism. We have seen the policies of FDR, discredited, Jimma Carter, discredited, and where are we? Still on the road to socialism. It is like a never-ending story that just gets worse and worse. As Rush says, we don't want to get along with them, we want to DEFEAT them. Now, go out and DEFEAT them not wish that they win!
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