Of course I didn’t watch the God-Emperor Obama’s Allocution To The Satraps the other night, but I did dip in for about three minutes to a youtube video of it yestereve. That was all I could take. It really made me feel physically ill. I have come to loathe his snapping, peevish schoolmasterly voice — he always sounds as if he were lecturing a class of not very promising undergraduates — and the slavish spectacle of the assembled solons leaping to their hind legs every thirty seconds to applaud his leaden platitudes was really disgraceful.
I did read a transcript of it. The text is worthy of study. It is remarkable that one can string together so many words and manage to say nothing — or perhaps I should say, nearly nothing; as near to nothing as you can get.
I did notice with some amusement that Obie has dropped the venerable custom of addressing the veep as ‘Mr President’ in this setting (since the veep is president of the senate). Presumably this is part of the deification of the chief executive: Only one president in this — or any — room, buddy, and it is I.
And even black holes leak some information. I felt distinctly put on notice that Medicare is headed for the abattoir. For example.
I’ve never really understood how people who know how virtually content-free this spectacle is still feel obligated (or interested) to and have the patience to read through it. It may just be that I’m incurious, but… could you explain?
I think some, including presumed radicals, believe that they have to be concerned about everything, no doubt to show their liberal friends, that they have the gravitas to be taken seriously. So they write about the State of the Union, and everything else, even matters about which they know little. The approach that MJS takes on these things is foreign to them. Not serious enough!
Far more modest and grounded in reality they are in the Old Country. A lesson Americans would do well to learn as well.
Have the world’s hammiest lounge singers, bedecked in smarm, ever milked applause so unrelentingly as a President of the United States addressing the Congress? Should there be a lapse during which the claqueurs fail to rise in hearty cheers, he will simply pause and wait until they take the hint. A Donald Trumpery spectacle.