Did you hear it yesterday? Even coming through the television couldn’t weaken the magic of The Voice as it worked its weirding way on all within earshot. It wasn’t the words themselves – vapid, cliche ridden, dog earred, 40 year old liberal pablum. And it wasn’t necessarily the way Obama delivered the words – the cadence and rythmn evoking the feeling you were listening to a combination of preacher and carnival huckster.
Obama’s gifts as an orator include his strong, melifulous voice – an instrument he plays beautifully using the full extent of the upper and lower registers, raising and lowering volume quite effectively. His phrasing is usually perfect. He never needs to stop mid sentence to take a breath or find his place on the teleprompter. There is little wasted motion as his body language and movement screams authority and confidence. No awkward hand motions. Everything is smooth as melted butter.
Above all, Obama has an extraordinary sense of his own performance – probably the result of hours and hours spent in front of a mirror. This has given his speeches a sense of the dramatic lacking in most political addresses. The guy could read the menu at a vegan restaurant and hold people spellbound.
All of these gifts, however, tend to obscure what he is actually saying rather than illuminate his ideas as Reagan’s or JFK’s oratory did. For JFK and his alter ego/wordsmith Teddy Sorenson, words were clay in their hands as they would carefully construct beautiful images while laying their ideas on top like captions to a photograph. Not a natural speaker like Obama and Reagan, Kennedy more than made up for that deficiency by never speaking down to his audience and inspiring people with, what at the time, was the boldness of his vision.
Reagan’s gifts were those of an actor. No modern speaker used the combination of body language and voice so perfectly. His sense of his own performance, like Obama’s, was pitch perfect. Reagan, much more than Obama, had an exact idea of what he looked like coming across on the small screen. He knew how his upper body was framed by the camera almost, it seemed, to the pixel. This allowed for a closer, more intimate look at the speaker. There was no wasted motion, no large moves of the hands or shoulders by Reagan. He and the camera were one which heightened the sense of drama that his words then completed.
Not surprisingly, Obama uses his gifts not to enlighten but to obscure the real ideas that lie beneath his rhetoric. Those ideas date back to the beginnings of the new left in the 1960’s and have not changed much in the intervening years. And there is no better example of this than his speech yesterday in Berlin.
A few examples will suffice:
Look at Berlin, where the bullet holes in the buildings and the somber stones and pillars near the Brandenburg Gate insist that we never forget our common humanity.
Constant references throughout the speech to the idea of “the brotherhood of man” – Lenin’s “new man” who was, as Obama identified himself, a “citizen of the world” who shared “common values” with all. Except those bullet holes – pot shots taken by East German gaurds at people fleeing tyranny – have nothing to do with “common humanity” and instead are reminders of the brutality of one system of government – communism. Until the left in this country and Europe come to grips with the evils perpetrated by that system, the chances of it happening again are probably better than 50-50.
People of the world—look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.
Obama loves rewriting history. Talk about hating America, we heard the same crap from the left about how hated we were all during the 1980’s right up until the time the wall fell. Even then, it was Gorbachev and not America who was responsible for that miracle according to liberals.
The fact is, the “world did not stand as one” against communism. Most of the world was against us. It was Thatcher, Reagan, and Pope John Paul II who freed Eastern Europe and anyone who was alive at the time knows it.
As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.
As even most responsible pro-global warming scientists will tell you, that is a crock of crap. It is impossible to prove cause and effect for droughts in the midwest being connected to a drought in Kenya. That is silly, stupid, and deliberately misleading. And Obama might want to make a note that there is more ice in the Arctic this summer than there has been in about 50 years.
That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another. The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.
More pie in the sky “brotherhood of man” crap especially because Obama fails to mention the reason why many of those walls are standing; if they came down, chances are a lot of those people would be at each other’s throats and no amount of magical speaking or wishful thinking will change that fact.
This is the moment when we must renew the goal of a world without nuclear weapons.
Not surprisingly, this old lefty dream received the most applause from the assembled masses. Like gun control, it is likely that if we take nukes out of the hands of nation states, the only ones who have them will be the terrorists.
And that’s a world I don’t want to live in.
This is the moment when every nation in Europe must have the chance to choose its own tomorrow free from the shadows of yesterday. In this century, we need a strong European Union that deepens the security and prosperity of this continent, while extending a hand abroad. In this century—in this city of all cities—we must reject the Cold War mind-set of the past, and resolve to work with Russia when we can, to stand up for our values when we must, and to seek a partnership that extends across this entire continent.
Would someone please tell me why there has been this fascination, this love affair with Russia on the part of the left for 90 years? I am sure Putin is licking his chops as a wolf looking at a bunch of sheep if Obama becomes president. Putins idea of “partnership” might differ a bit from the messiah’s.
This is the moment when we must build on the wealth that open markets have created, and share its benefits more equitably. Trade has been a cornerstone of our growth and global development. But we will not be able to sustain this growth if it favors the few, and not the many.
Confiscation anyone? Obama wants to extend this old leftist dream of robbing the rich and giving some of it to the poor (the rest going to government bureaucrats) from American rich to the rich of other countries. Why another nation’s system of wealth distribution should be anyone else’s business – least of all Barack Obama’s – is beyond me.
This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.
More global warming hysteria. Beg to differ with the messiah but the children of today will almost certainly miss the effects of catastrophic global warming – if it happens – since most responsible global warming advocates see a 100-200 year timeframe before the worst occurs (this despite recent “studies” showing differently). And at the moment, the world’s weather just isn’t cooperating as the earth has actually cooled over the last decade. But that won’t stop this gigantic con game from going forward to redistribute the wealth of the world while curbing if not destroying industrialized civilization.
Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words “never again” in Darfur?
Very nice words, Barack. Very pretty. But what are you going to DO about it? As a topper for recycled leftist pap, this is the keeper – the belief that if we all just “stand” with the dissident from Burma, he won’t have his head and hands chopped off. Or the bloger in Iran won’t be thrown in jail if we hold a concert. Or the voter in Zimbabwe won’t have their head bashed in if we all sit around in a circle and think good thoughts.
The utter stupidity and yes, uselessness of these ideas is dressed up in beautiful prose and delivered by a gifted charlatan who, I am coming to suspect, doesn’t have a clue what he will do once in office. End the Iraq war? Not hardly. The man says so himself. National health insurance? Whose plan? How’s he going to get it passed? Taxes up. Some people’s tax bill (like mine) doubling.
When is someone going to ask him what he’s going to do to bring down the price of gasoline? Nothing in his speech to the non-voting Germans made mention of that. The housing crisis? More regulation and bail outs, rewarding bad business practices and stupid consumers both.
Obama’s disguising his far left ideas in pretty language and excellent delivery of his speeches is exactly the opposite of what almost every great political orator in American history has sought to do. Due to his “weirding ways,” he has managed to fool a great number of people into believing he is something he is not; a politician that will transform America into some kind of utopia where we all get along and people are healthy, happy, and content.
Strip aside the rhetoric and the mesmerizing presence on the stump and you are left with a rather ordinary, rather inspid liberal with visions of a planet united and America a slavish partner to the goals and aspirations of the bureaucrats at the United Nations – the US an emasculated presence while our own vital interests take second place to those preaching the gospel of universal brotherhood.
This has been a dream of the new left for 60 years. And Obama, the word made flesh of that dream, is just the man to fulfill that destiny.
9:39 am
“It was Thatcher, Reagan, and Pope John Paul II who freed Eastern Europe and anyone who was alive at the time knows it.”
I was alive at the time, albeit still in high school (even got to visit the USSR before the collapse—no advertising anywhere. Unearthly.) Always seemed to me that the greatest player in the freedom of Eastern Europe and Russia was Gorbachev. I know we like to think that Reagan’s “tear down this wall” pablum was so powerful the Soviet’s collapsed, but imho the Soviets wern’t forced into quitting (debt? bad PR? like they gave a damn) . . . it took a once-in-a-lifetime statesman to rise to the heights of his country’s power structure, look out on the Politburo, and say “This is friggin silly. Let’s try something else.”
btw . . . first Hitler, now Lenin. I’m moderately impressed, but to really get me applauding I’m waiting for the trifecta and your “Obama reminds me of Genghis Kahn” post. C’mon, you know it’s in there! Let the eagle soar, Mr. M!
9:59 am
So, yesterday he was Der Fuhrer and today he’s Lenin? That scamp! Nazi, communist, carnival barker, empty suit, Muslim extremist, corrupt hack. He’s everything from rent-seeking Chicago pol to naif to Hitler. That’s quite a range.
It has become one of my daily entertainments reading conservative bloggers twisting themselves into knots trying to come up with just the right insult. The killer insult. The magic word-potion that will expunge the foul beast of hope and change.
It never fails to bring a smile to my lips. We’re not even to the convention yet. What are you guys saving for later in the campaign? Was Obama the second gunman?
What’s particularly amusing is that you’re doing exactly what you accuse liberals of doing. They project their hopes onto an almost blank slate, and you project your fears. Obama’s a Rorshach test revealing the deepest fantasies and secret thrills of the right’s feverish imagination.
At this rate of progress he’ll be Satan himself by late tomorrow afternoon. Unless he turns into Obambi again. Satan . . . Obambi . . .Hmmmm. The truth must be in there somewhere.
Maybe you ought to be afraid: he’s obliterating your credibility without doing a thing.
10:28 am
Rick, excellent entry.
Anyone who really paid attention to what Obama says (and he really says so very little) they would understand that his speeches are simply recycled pablum from the 60’s. The “Why can’t we all just get along” mantra that has never stopped one dictator, one genocidial totalitarian, one power hungry maniac.
We are told by others (UN type folks) that the U.S. is the reason other nations are third world outhouses. We are told we are “imperialistic”, “dominating” and have no feelings for anyone except ourselves.
So as Obama appeals to the “Kumbaya” crowd, not one of those in that crowd has purchased an airline ticket to go to Darfur and plead with the people responsibile for the pain there. You see, instead, it is so much easier to protest in front of the D.C. Capitol where they are safe from the bullets of radicals that would put a rapid end to their protests. CodePinkos will support Obama as they march down Pennslyvania Avenue, but not risk putting their policies into action in Falujah, demanding that the terrorists stop their terrorist ways.
We can’t always “all get along”. There will always be another Pol Pot, another Milosovitch, another Saddam. But not one peacenik will tell them to stop when it is so much easier to demand that the U.S. stop.
OK, I’m all for that. We should stop. Stop sending food to the most hunger stricken nations in the world at the cost of billions to the American taxpayer. Stop sending our military into places whose names most Americans can’t pronounce at the cost of American blood and treasure. We should stop being the first responders when a tsunami hits, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people. You had a major earthquake? We send our condolences. But no money or emergency supplies. Got a little genocide going on from a civil war? Sorry about that, but after all, the global warming gurus say there are too many people on the globe and we must worry about the next generations, don’t you think? Oh, and by the way, from now on we are going to impose the Roman Rule; we kick you butt in a war, we keep your nation as the ruling conquerors. When we suck up all your natural treasure, if there is any, we just might give it back to you.
Can we now call Senator Obama the Prince of Platitudes? Say a lot of nothing? Lots of causes, no solutions. Be all things to all people with hopey change. But understand that “hope” and “change” means different things to each individual person. One hopes for a change in financial status. One hopes for change in something else. To each is own “hope and change”.
Anyone who doesn’t resent that Obama would go to a city that is notorious for so much past pain in the world and pander to citizens who are just this side of true socialism, must be drunk on Koolaid. Red Koodaid.
I will remind those who think he is the answer to all questions of this one statement of the Lightworker given to Terry:
“There was ethnic cleansing in Baghdad that actually took the violence level down.”
Got that Obamaniacs? Obama thinks that ethnic cleansing lowers violence. That should tell you all you need to know about his ability to impliment any meaningful foreign policy.
At a time when the western world is facing the greatest threat it has ever known, forces driven by religion and not the desire for territory, who are reinstating a war that ended on Sept. 11, 1683, we do not need someone who thinks that genocide is no reason to keep troops in Iraq or that ethnic cleansing reduces violence.
10:30 am
Mr. Moran, Rick..:
Obama was sandwiched between two bands playing nearby, yesterday…more false attendance…
10:39 am
#1 and #2;
while you are blissfully enjoying your adoration of the Obamassiah, perhaps we can look at exactly how the One has improved things he had been directly involved in; like his own Illinois senate district?
Did housing for the poor and lower income families improve? Or did he accept campaign donations from a Chicago scam artist (now convicted criminal) while that scam artist pleaded that he could not afford to put heat in slum buildings during one of the coldest winters in Chicago history? Did the kids in those neighborhoods no longer have to walk past the drug dealers and pimps on their way to school? Did the number of jobs for the unemployed increase? Crime rate go down in his district or has it finally reached the boiling point so that the governor of Illinois threatening to send in the National Guard?
Or are you just so dissatisfied with your own life that when the One promises you hope and change, you can define that in any terms that apply to only you? Care to explain to use non-believers what exactly “hope and change” means, really means, on a national level? Or are you only hoping The One will make the trains (or planes) run on time?
10:43 am
As if I needed more proof of what an empty-headed, empty suit buffoon he is, this dream of a world without nukes highlights his complete naivity. My dream is different. I dream that we all win the lottery, and we can all have mansions on the beach, with rich, beautiful dancing girls serving our every whim. Mine is more likely to come true. Besides, to quote (maybe a paraphrase) TJ, “Those who beat their swords into plows, will plow for those that do not”. Maybe he should move to Germany- they don’t have nukes, and they seem to love him.
10:48 am
One more thing… the overwhelmingly lopsided, free media coverage of this trip, the unabashed bias by NYT and other media, the thrill going up Chris Matthew’s leg… all of this should have Obama up by 20 points. An amazing thing is happening- this boring, technically challenged, senile old man is tied (within the margin of error) with Obama, and is closing the gap.
Maybe Americans aren’t as stupid as I thought.
10:51 am
1 and 2,
problem with your arguments is you negate the true answer in you failed appeal. why did russia leave afganistan mr. busboy? think long and think hard on that, then think what happened with all the satellite states of the USSR? hmmm…(basically, quit trying to rewrite history).
as for obama being labeled this and labeled that mr. reynolds. has he socialist/communist tinkering and associations? hmmm… has he terrorist/racist friends and associates? hmmm… is he now embracing the cult of personality/facism… hmmm, again… while still making, what shall we call it (cause it sure as f%#k is not a move, a lie to the center?
how about this, “the chameleon has many colors but which is its natural color?”
11:18 am
It’s funny how much time you spend bashing the Democratic candidate while barley a sentence gets devoted to your Republican candidate.
12:50 pm
Friday afternoon links…
I am off to sea again – see y’all on Monday, God willing. Try to have as fine a weekend as I will. The stripers are biting. Stripers, not strippers.Respect: Why it’s not a bad thing to be named GambinoRick Moran outdoes himself. One quote:Strip aside…
1:03 pm
@ retire05:
Funny . . . I don’t remember writing anything praising Obama in the post. Let me re-read it . . . nope. Not a word of praise. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I’ve ever said he was a great person, or a great candidate. Feel free to correct me, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t since I’m not a huge fan of his.
Guess you equate “not-foaming-at-the-mouth-rabid-hatred” with worshipful adoration. Understandable when your worldview consists of pitch black and glowing white, but might I suggest there are different shades in between?
However, I do have to agree with the point that ethnic cleansing reduces violence. When you have two parties fighting, and one wipes out the other, there tends to be less fighting. Since that sounds so silly to you, feel free to educate me: Who do the winners fight with after they’ve murdered all their opponents?
3:47 pm
Well Well, now we have it. A lefty with style. All style and little substance. Think of Mondale and you will get a contrast like color versus black and white. The thing is that I still believe that most Americans are smarter than Mr. Obama, have a little faith. Only the base of the left will suck up this stuff like mothers milk and die wondering why. I believe that Ronald Regan’s faith in the common sense of most Americans remains a force that will prevail in our coming election. But don’t stop spreading the word about this guy. Every time he opens his mouth his numbers fall farther. His platitudes don’t work on people with a brain, may have worked in the hoods he ‘organized’ but it won’t work on most of America.
3:55 pm
busboy33, well there’s our answer to Darfur. Just let the evil ones kill off all the innocent people wholla! no more killing.
Do you think that was the philosphy Pol Pot and Milosovitch used?
4:58 pm
@ Retire05:
“Got that Obamaniacs? Obama thinks that ethnic cleansing lowers violence. That should tell you all you need to know about his ability to impliment any meaningful foreign policy.”
This doesn’t say that ethnic cleansing lowering violence is a good thing, or a desirable course of action—it just says that ethnic cleansing lowers violence. You indicated that idea is nonsensical, and I indicated that it seems to be factually correct. I’m not sure how you jumped to ethnic cleansing as a positive policy goal from the above statement, and I certainly hope you don’t think Obama said “Ethnic cleansing is a great way to reduce violence” because he didn’t, and I’m sure you know that.
Still not following your argument. You claimed that Obama made a statement and implied that the statement was so outrageous anybody who would say that was an idiot. I said that, far from being outrageous, the statement sounded pretty factually accurate on its face. Somewhere in that you heard “ethnic cleansing is a great idea for foreign policy”, something nobody has said except you. How does Obama’s “statement” impinge his fitness for the job of President?
Just so I’m clear—I’m NOT an Obama fan (I would have voted for Biden if I was registered Democrat, but as an Independent I don’t get a say in party primaries). I’m just stunned at the level of hatred he generates among the hardcore Right, and what amazes me the most is the strongest insults I hear hurled at him are “He makes empty speeches and vacuous promises!!” Really? A politician (of ANY party) making vague, nice-sounding-but-substancially-empty speeches? I’m rocked to my core. I guess next you’ll tell me there’s no Easter Bunny too.
btw, “let them kill each other” seems to have been our official Darfur policy for the last decade or so.
7:59 pm
He’s a Hitler! He’s the Messiah! He’s the unstoppable HitlerJesus! Gotta get me some of that kool aid.