Posted on 05/02/2011 1:25:51 PM PDT by neverdem
I know, I know, if you can’t blog anything real nice it’s better not to blog at all, that’s my advice. Nevertheless:
Personally, I would have liked bin Laden’s death to have been announced by whatever lowest-level official was manning the night desk at the Department of Nondescript Bureaucrats, preferably reading it off the back of an envelope. But, if you’re going to put the head of state on TV to announce it himself, it would have been better to have been all brisk and businesslike – “At 0800 hours American military assets entered an address at 27b Jihadist Gardens, etc” – and finish off with a bit of Churchillian sober uplift about it not being the end or the beginning of the end but maybe the end of the beginning.
Instead, as Stephen Hunter, the novelist and Washington Post film critic, writes:
Any joy one might feel in the intelligence of our analysts and the bravery of our door kickers was significantly diminished by Obama’s malignant narcissism. The first part of the announcement, evoking 9/11, was vulgarly overwritten as per Obama’s view of himself as some kind of gifted orator. The adjective bloated compote was unworthy of the subject, banal and self-indulgent.
I was, I confess, a little stunned by the first part of the President’s speech. It was, as Mr Hunter says, overwritten. It managed to be both overwrought and generic – all that telepromptered overload about cloudless Tuesday mornings was not only tackily over-prettified but came over as unfelt and hand-me-down, like a course exercise in some third-rate creative-writing school’s Soaring Oratory class. Or, at any rate, as if they’d loaded up a first draft of September’s tenth anniversary speech into the machine. The official announcement was delayed for all this? If ever there was a moment for the commander-in-chief to be real, plainspoken and off his glassy-eyed follow-the-bouncing-ball routine, this was it. It’s as if nobody around him knows how to write except in the one tinny key.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to rally round the flag, and rally round the President, but rally round this speech? No thanks.
I like that phrase too! I’ll use just as soon as I look up the definition for “compote”
>> P.S. I’ve read comments that bin Laden’s demise is a scam.
“I think he’s dead, Jim.”
My surreality limits have been reached.
No doubt! That, and there will be at least two guys at every bar that “were there”.
“(SEALs: They’ll Shoot Your Eyes Out.)”
ROFL!
“BHO’s “bravery” “
I hate to say this but Bush chickened out the several times they could have had OBL. It annoys me to no end to think a liberal POS Democrat like Zero is going to get credit that Bush should have taken years ago.
If it's not published in a peer reviewed journal, they'll be demands and Freedom Of Information Act requests. How do they refuse without looking fishy, if not absurd? Geneticists will say are there any mutations or other markers of psychopathology? They'll have enough reasons to study it like the 1917 influenza virus.
Pretty bold for a Wash Po film critic
Usually they are the worst libs
Pretty bold for a Wash Po film critic
Usually they are the worst libs
those units never confirm nor take credit other than attributed to them by the CinC.
They stopped practicing “2 to the chest, 1 to the head” years and years ago.
I think “compote” works better in the sentence, because it’s something you think you might like, at first, until you look at it a little more closely and see that it’s full of adjectives that were past their use-or-freeze date.
love that tag Sir Travis...
bfl
“The Red Rider Gun Team”. hehe
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other." - John Adams, Letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts,11 October 1798.
I daresay nary a one. As to your tagline, the Presidential staff makes up the “facts” as it goes. It’s the American people who need to wake up and face the (real) facts.
True. And so sad.
Mark Steyn ping.
Thanks for the ping neverdem.
Freepmail me, if you want on or off the Mark Steyn ping list.
0bama is the master of the “It was a dark and stormy night, then I came upon the scene” speech.
And with all and I mean ALL of the horrific press that was handed to President Bush and his team thru the years as he fought to keep us safe, having to quietly and daily suffer an onslaught from the big networks (ever wonder why gas prices are not the headline everyday like they were under President Bush? Makes ya SICK!)- if that creep in our WH with his I-me-myself-and-I speech about the killing of Osama DOES NOT INVITE PRESIDENT BUSH TO STAND BESIDE HIM AT GROUND ZERO ON THURSDAY AND SPEAK TO THIS NATION-I will forever see Mr. I,ME, MYSELF and I as the single most narcissistic, mean, cowardly and inept president in my lifetime.
When a man cannot give credit where credit is do, he is the weakest of the weak.
Let alone...a Navy ship crew.
Someone..would talk, IMO.
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