Why Obama is pitied: speeches to songs convention showed that even for Dems the thrill is gone

New York Post ^ | September 9, 2012 | Kyle Smith

[presidio9]

Two hours after getting drunk on the rhetorical moonshine served up by Bill Clinton Wednesday night, delegates and hacks won’t stop believin’ there’s a decent place to get a real drink in this dismal Southern burg.

We’re stumbling thirstily along South Tryon Street at 1:31 a.m. when a hunched lone figure is stopped by an excitable young woman. Dude is dressed all in black, scraggly beard, greasy hair, tiny frame. He’s so aggressively meek that he’s gotta be a celebrity of some sort. He looks like the rough draft they threw out when they were making Johnny Depp.

AP

Girls in iridescent cocktail dresses and freshly pressed hair have a better sense for these things than I. They flock around the little guy brandishing iPhones. He poses without smiling, then moves along, hands in pockets, the weight of fame pressing his head downward.

“Who was that?” we ask, for we are tired middle-aged hacks, not swoony young Democratic party groupies on the make.

“JARED GATO!!!!” cries one of the young women.

“Who?” says a colleague.

“Thirty Seconds to Mars?” she says.

Ah, well. If you’re extremely female and 24, Jared Leto is indeed the singer of Thirty Seconds to Mars, a mediocre rock band. If you’re the same plus 20 years, he’s an actor, the one who played the dreamboat on “My So-Called Life.”

On the other hand, if you have any taste, he is (along with Meat Loaf) one of Tyler Durden’s creepy postmodernist terror troops in “Fight Club.”

Mr. Gato/Leto is, in other words, a rock star, a love object, a monster.

He reminded us all of another celebrity shuffling dejectedly through Charlotte. Another guy whose best work was years ago, whose reinvention hasn’t really worked out, who was a heartthrob before he became just “that guy.”

And

[presidio9]

I rarely do this, but this is one article that I highly recommend you click through and read in its entirety.

[Psycho_Bunny]

“Barack Obama the unifier became Barack Obama the divider”

Wait. What?

When was this alleged “unifier” phase?

[presidio9]

Sometimes I make the mistake of assuming everyone gets NY sarcasm. Obama presented himself as a unifier and 2008 and 53% of the country bought it. After his keynote in 2004, a much higher percentage of Americans saw him that way.

[philman_36]

Despite being a little long in the tooth...that weren’t half bad. /SE Texas humor

[thulldud]

I rarely do this, but this is one article that I highly recommend you click through and read in its entirety.

Totally worth it. For instance, FTA:

But Democrats didn’t need God in the platform. Because as of Thursday night, they had God on the platform.

[Excellence]

Rush is on this in today’s 10:00 hour.