As measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, “for the third straight Address, the President’s State of the Union message was written at an eighth-grade level.”
I’ve long maintained—and explained in “‘You Can’t Fix Stupid'”—that Barry Soetoro is simple. Read more about the “Smart Politics” study that would seem to back that up.
I was going to say that the study deconstructs the president’s use of language. However, that structure was so basic that there was little to dismantle.
America, Barack Obama, Constitution, Democrats, History, Politics, Propaganda, Republicans
Not that the Xbox nation would notice, but there are a lot more flashing images on Barack Obama’s website, at WhiteHouse.gov, than there are written words. As such, not much information is available on the president’s annual State of the Union message.
But like everything in the Constitution, a modest thing has morphed into a monstrosity. Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution required that the president “shall from time to time give to Congress information of the state of Union.”
A “Stalinesque extravaganza” that ought to offend “anyone of a republican (small ‘r’ …) sensibility,” is how National Review’s John Derbyshire has described the State of the Union speech. “American politics frequently throws up disgusting spectacles. It throws up one most years in January: the State of the Union speech,” writes Derb in “We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism,” a book I discussed in “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed'”
John goes on to furnish the quotidian details of how “the great man” is announced, how he makes an entrance; the way “the legislators jostle to catch his eye” and receive his favor. “On the podium at last, the president offers up preposterously grandiose assurances of protection, provision, and moral guidance from his government, these declarations of benevolent omnipotence punctuated by standing ovations and cheers from legislators” (p. 45).
Then there is the display of “Lenny Skutniks” in the audience, “model citizens chosen in order to represent some quality the president will call on us to admire and emulate” (last year it was the family of the little girl who was murdered by the Tucson shooter).
Derb analyzes this monarchical, contrived tradition against the backdrop of the steady inflation of the presidential office, and a trend “away from ‘prose’ to ‘poetry’; away from substantive argument to “hot air.”
The president of the USA is now “pontiff, in touch with Divinity, to be addressed like the Almighty.”
Prepare to puke.
UPDATE (Jan. 24): THE BARF RULE. The “Lenny Skutnik” for 2012 is …Warren Buffett’s secretary.
Debbie Bosanek “will be sitting with the first lady in her gallery box Tuesday night as President Obama announces his plans for tax reform at the State of the Union address. Bosanek, who has worked for Buffett for nearly two decades, has become as symbol of Obama’s tax reform plan. The ‘Buffett rule,’ named after her billionaire boss, aims to insure that wealthy taxpayers do not pay an effective tax rate lower than their secretaries.” (Via FoxNews)
Prepare to barf.
Barack Obama, Crime, Drug War, Homeland Security, Military, Political Philosophy, Race, Racism, Republicans, Ron Paul, War
January 16th, 2012: If the November election were held today, a CNN/ORC International Poll released Monday shows Ron Paul is almost statistically tied with Obama, with the president at 48% and the longtime congressman at 46%.
The CNN/ORC International poll has Obama beating Paul by a slim 48%-46% margin, but add in the margin of error and it is basically tied. The same goes for Romney’s 48%-47% lead over the president. The poll shows Obama easily beating the other Republican candidates.
Here are all the Ron Paul South Carolina FOX Debate Highlights:
There is a difference between defense spending and “military spending,” and between what Eisenhower called the military-industrial-complex and national defense.
Let us not rehash the Paul drug-war racism comments, which I dissected in “Diane (Sawyer) in Disneyland (The Homo-eroticism of Left-Liberalism)”
UPDATE (Jan. 18): The New York Times concedes that “a majority of independent voters have soured on BHO’s presidency, disapprove of how he has dealt with the economy and do not have a clear idea of what he hopes to accomplish if re-elected. … Two-thirds of independent voters say he has not made real progress fixing the economy.”
What amazes me, and I can only presume that some statistical error has crept into the data (such as a bias toward giving a favorable answer for fear of being labeled You Know What), is that “38 percent of all voters BHO favorably.”
The independents vote is ripe for Ron Paul.
UPDATE II: Unfortunately, Paul repeated the leftist rant he delivered in New Hampshire about how drug laws are enforced in the United States, pointing out that black men are incarcerated at disproportionate rates. (“How many times have you seen the white rich person get the electric chair?” he asked. “If we really want to be concerned with racism…we ought to look at the drug laws.”)
I said on 01.07.12 that, as a rightist I abjure anti-drug laws on the grounds that they are wrong, not racist. The fact that these laws ensnare blacks is because blacks are more likely to violate them by dealing drugs or engaging in violence around commerce in drugs, not necessarily because all cops are racists.
Cops deal with the reality of crime. It is an error—and wrong—to accuse them all of targeting blacks when the latter actually commit more crimes in proportion to their numbers in the population. This is also a losing strategy with rightists. It is akin to aping Obama, who went hell-for-leather at Sgt. James Crowley, calling him a racist for mishandling his pal Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. That strategy helped BHO lose the midterms.
“Dennis Prager offers stats showing judicial system is biased against whites, not blacks”:
…it is clear that blacks are actually under-represented in executions.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-death-penalty organization, between 1976 and January 2012, 441 blacks (35 percent of the total) and 717 whites (55 percent of the total) were executed. Given that blacks committed more than half the murders during that time (52 percent versus 46 percent by whites), if we are to assess racial bias based on proportionality of murderers executed, the system is biased against whites, not blacks.
Because this fact is both obvious and irrefutable, virtually none of the anti-death-penalty sites note it. Instead, they focus on the race of murder victims and even the race of prosecutors – in other words, the race of just about everyone except those convicted of murder.
Barack Obama, Bush, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Journalism, Just War, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism
Like the late Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan lacks a philosophical core. Unlike Hitchens, Sullivan is not a formidable intellect, rhetorician and writer. Hitchens didn’t have to struggle to stay interesting. Sullivan does. The fruits of Sullivan’s Struggle are splayed on the latest cover of Newsweek, provocatively subtitled, “Why are Obama’s Critic’s So Dumb?”
A caveat: I [Andy] write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending, and torture. … If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008. And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.
Crunchy Con Andy would like his followers to forget what I documented last in “Confess, Clinton; Say You’re Sorry, Sullivan“:
Senator Hillary Clinton and neoconservative blogger Andrew Sullivan share more than a belief that “Jesus, Mohamed, and Socrates are part of the same search for truth.” They’re both Christians who won’t confess to their sins.
Both were enthusiastic supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, turned scathing and sanctimonious critics of the war. Neither has quite come clean. Both ought to prostrate themselves before those they’ve bamboozled, those they’ve helped indirectly kill, and whichever deity they worship. (The Jesus-Mohamed-and-Socrates profanity, incidentally, was imparted by Sullivan, during a remarkably rude interview he gave Hugh Hewitt. The gay activist-cum-philosopher king was insolent; Hewitt took it .)
I won’t bore you with the hackneyed war hoaxes Sullivan once spewed, only to say that there was not an occurrence he didn’t trace back to Iraq: anthrax, September 11, and too few gays in the military—you name it; Iraq was behind it. Without minimizing the role of politicians like Clinton, who signed the marching orders, pundits like Sullivan provided the intellectual edifice for the war, also inspiring impressionable young men and women to sacrifice their lives and limbs to the insatiable Iraq Moloch.