Another crack!
Bookworm on Mar 06 2009 at 9:05 am | Filed under: Barack Obama
Mr. Bookworm read in the New York Times its reprint of the Politico story about Obama’s teleprompter addiction.
“That’s really bad,” he said.
Rather than agreeing or opining, I simply asked “Why?”
“Because,” said Mr. Bookworm, “it clashes with his reputation as a great orator.”
Again, I forebore to point out the obvious, which is that Obama’s never been a great orator. Instead, he’s been an actor who can memorize speeches, if necessary, but who prefers to read them so as not to tax his brain. Had I said that, Mr. Bookworm would have fought the idea. By remaining silent, perhaps he’ll figure it out himself.
Related posts:
- A teeny crack in the wall
- Two great articles about Obama’s speeches *UPDATED*
- Taking on Emperor Obama’s new clothes
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28 Responses to “Another crack!”
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Thanks, Book. These “buyers’ remorse” stories give us a few more straws to clutch. Let’s hope the straws can grow into a forest…and fast!
Heh. Is there some actor in some part that you could praise as being a “great orator”? My guess is that Mr Bookworm would probably tell you that you’re nuts – “he’s just an actor”. Then the next question is “but how can I tell the difference between xx the actor/orator and Obama, the orator? Isn’t oratory oratory?
I know. Probably no one who fits the part – but it’s delicious to think about it.
You’d probably get farther with Mr Books “conversion” if you continued to play dumb – since liberals consistently consider themselves smarter than the average bear – and fed him leading questions he can’t answer without giving it some thought. Since he’s apparently a liberal(and also because he’s a male and there’s that old dominance thing), it’s critical to his sense of superiority that he’s right and you’re wrong. You may find it somewhat offensive, but playing the meek “little woman” who needs her big strong man to figure out things for her, with your guidance and wisely chosen “dumb” questions, you might be able to get him anywhere you want him.
The liberal/male thing means that he has to resist anything you state as “right” – because _he_ has to be “right”. If it’s _your_ thought process, since you’re obviously (since you’re female and conservative) wrong, he _has_ to argue the opposite side.
In judo – which I took years (and years and years) ago, you deliberately yield to your opponent in such a way that you can pull him off balance and throw him. The theory of judo is to yield to the opponent in order to win – in life as in competition (judo is a competitive sport, not a self defense method) because life _is_ a competition.
That’s my thinking exactly, Suek. Mr. Bookworm used to open with massive attacks on President Bush (my guy), which foreclosed thought and discussion. My approach is to let him question Obama (his guy), and let him draw his own conclusions. I think he’s going to be very unhappy, very soon, with his chosen leader.
It is unfortunate to see such a split in the Bookworm home. I don’t think I could stand being married to a liberal (or even moderate) woman… I’d lose my mind.
I am reminded of an old Eleanor Roosevelt story (a true one) when thinking about the liberal ability to cling to cognitive dissonance no matter what.
It was 1936 and Eleanor was on the hustings for Franklin in some remote West Virginia hamlet. She was standing in a drafty town hall before 200 hostile hillbillies explaining why Franklin should be returned to the presidency.
The mountain people were tough customers, but so was Eleanor. At one point, an old man in the back, down to his last tooth, barked out, “Franklin Delano Roosevelt f*cks his mother!”
After the gasps (and giggles) died down, every eye turned to Eleanor to see how she would respond. She drew herself up and said, “Nevertheless!” then resumed her prepared remarks.
——
So, when you break it to your True Believer liberal friend that Barack Hussein Obama sleeps with his teleprompter, be prepared for “Nevertheless!”
Bookworm –
I am in awe of your restraint. Seriously. I don’t have it in me.
Me neither, Book. Living with a spouse so diametrically opposed to my value system would be like living with chronic indigestion.
Sticking with the teleprompter means he never has to worry about an honest word slipping past his lips. You know: another ‘Joe the Plumber’ moment.
The Emperor’s New Teleprompter, a modern fable. He’s really not a great orator. He’s really not saying anything. Nothing new. It is the same old liberal Democrat playbook: higher taxes, lower defenses.
I hate to disagree with Bookworm, but I have to ask. Show me the evidence that he CAN memorize a speech.
You must have addressed this before, but does he never read your blog? I can’t imagine being married to a blogger and never ever taking a peek.
Mr. Bookworm will not read my blog. He reads only the NY Times, The New Yorker and (listens to) NPR. He will occasionally go wild and check out the WaPo or LA Times. He considers himself very well informed, and refuses to accept that the MSM withholds critical information.
How do you tell? READ the speeches.
The sadly departed Paul Harvey and Arthur Godfrey could hold a national audience by reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (with potatoes and mint jelly).
Remember William Conrad? You may have known him as Frank Cannon, Private Eye. Short, dumpy, plain, less than stellar actor – his voice made him a TV star.
Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan sang from the same hymnal. Reagan had a better voice and was a practiced actor. Please don’t misunderstand – RR had a wisdom that defies definition, as did Dwight Eisenhower.
I have read Obama’s speeches and his books. There ain’t nuthin there folks.
My entire extended family is Mr. Bookworm.
You should be sighing some relief this weekend, at least he is pondering something he read in the NYT and the best part – he didn’t need a teleprompter.
>>How do you tell? READ the speeches.>>
Hmmm. Maybe somebody – _surely_ SOMEBODY – has a book out with all of Obama’s speeches. Might make a _great_ gift. And grist for the mill of discussion…!
Book, keep up these “cracks in the wall” stories. They give us hope.
Charles Martel: IMHO, that entertaining Eleanor Roosevelt story does not indicate the ability of liberals to cling to cognitive dissonance, but rather that unlike Our Current President, Eleanor Roosevelt had an ability to improvise and think on her feet.
Imagine Eleanor Roosevelt or Obama on a soap box in London’s Hyde Park, speaking and dealing with hecklers. Given the Eleanor Roosevelt story about the hillbilly heckler, I suspect that she could have held her own with the Hyde Park hecklers. ( London, not Chicago). Obama would have been reduced to strings of “uhs” in short order. And “ums.”
As another example of a Presidential wife dealing with hostile audiences, consider Lady Bird Johnson’s whistle-stop tour of the South after the passage of the Civil Rights Bill. That took a lot of guts on her part. It might be said that the best decision LBJ ever made was to marry Lady Bird. I say this not to denigrate LBJ, but to praise him. I do not want to get into an LBJ discussion.
Nonetheless, here is an LBJ story my uncle told me when I visited him this week. He saw LBJ and RFK in the presidential limousine,stopped in traffic near Grand Central Station. RFK was was wagging his finger at LBJ. Guess the rumors that LBJ and RFK didn’t like each other were not based on fantasy!
I guess I can understand some of Mr. Bookworm’s behavior. When I lived in the
west Village, and spent two hour brunches sipping bloody marys and reading the NYT at Johnny Day’s off Sheridan Square on Sunday mornings, I could easily delude myself I had all the important information needed to understand the world. The ambiance of living in the most powerful city in the world can blind one.
The Japanese felt the same way until Commodore Perry came knocking at their door.
It’s a good think he has you, BW, to catch him when the cold light of reality finally breaks through that brittle wall of delusion.
Al
Oldflyer #10:
>> I hate to disagree with Bookworm, but I have to ask. Show me the evidence that he CAN memorize a speech.
One of my guiding principles is not to descend into ODS (Obama Derangement Syndrome). He disgusts me so much, it would be easy to do; but just as BDS has made the arguments of so many on the left irrelevant, descending into ODS would make me irrelevant as well.
So, with that in mind, let me offer the observation that when Obama *knows* he has to enter an arena where a teleprompter is not allowed, he has learned to manage it fairly well. I am thinking in particular of his debates against McCain.
Obama has oratorical and rhetorical gifts. They’re fairly impressive. As a lawyer he also has learned to speak unpleasant truths in a vague but reassuring manner that will slip right into your head like a Jedi mind trick.
I’ve gotten very good at not letting anything Obama says into my head without applying rigorous parsing and logic. When he says the word “investment” he *always* means, “take your taxes and spend them on a program I like”, for example, and I immediately make the substitution in my head, while I snort and holler the word “Investment!” with as much disdain as I can muster.
Another trick to be careful of is his use of words like “we’ll try to”, “sometimes”, “perhaps”, “maybe”, “not necessarily”, etc. What follows these little phrases is usually something very agreeable and he speaks it VERY STRONGLY, as if he’s making you a heartfelt promise from the very depths of his soul, and you just know he’d rather die on a thousand mile starvation march than break that promise he’s making to you right now, he sounds so very sincere…
…yet because of the qualification phrase, he’s doing nothing of the sort. It’s pure fluff; he’s not making a promise; and he has no intention of doing what he has just said. It’s a miserable lie, in other words, and he’s so good at it that it’s scary.
Regarding the “as a lawyer” point that everyone talks about with regard to Obama’s rhetorical gifts: As far as I know, Obama almost never saw the inside of a courtroom. That’s where you hone your lawyer-like rhetorical gifts. Also, as far as I know, Obama was never a serious brief-writer, which is where you own your lawyer’s advocacy gifts. That he learned legal thinking is beyond dispute. His rhetorical gifts, though, such as they are (and I’ve never liked them), are both a natural gift and a cultivated political product. He’s got a naturally serpentine mind and he’s educated — ergo, he sounds like a lawyer.
Incidentally, as someone who has observed many courtroom arguments and written and read thousands of legal briefs, very few lawyers are rhetorically gifted, nor are they good advocates. They’re just sloggers who play by the numbers. If one accepts that Obama is a rhetorician and an advocate (something I accept academically, because neither his rhetoric nor arguments resonate with me), he was born with that kind of mind and simply cultivated it over the years.
Book, I apologize from the bottom of my heart. I had thought Obama was an activist lawyer who spent a good deal of time in the courtroom arguing social justice lawsuits.
I apologize again, sincerely!
It appears he learned his rhetorical sleights of hand elsewhere.
I’m too lazy to go looking for actual examples of Obama sleight-of-hand, but I conjure this one up, and I believe I am not exaggerating anything in my invented example:
Obama on some MSM news show:
“You know, Sam, I hear all these critics of mine, frothing and, uh – well they seem to me to be frothing and ranting – about the Second Amendment.” (Obama smiles widely, shaking his head slightly)
“You’d think I was coming out there to kick in their doors and take their guns away from them TOMORROW! And the truth is – you know – the absolute truth is-” (and here his face goes almost grim with absolute rectitude, seriousness, and sincerity) – “NOTHING could be further from the truth. Nothing.”
(His face becomes open and transparent – an I will never lie to you expression, full of all the empathy and sincerity in the world.)
“I have absolutely no intention of doing that. I never will. I respect these people. I never will do that. I promise you.”
—–
Now, when you read the written word, the fallacy might already have leapt out at you. But we’re far less capable of parsing the audio, and the trusting public have just been viciously, and deliberately, Jedi-mind-tricked.
Obama absolutely means his promise: He will not be KICKING DOWN your doors and taking your guns TOMORROW.
It’s a straw man, and it’s deliberate.
But he WILL be taking your guns. He did not promise not to! It only sounded to you as though he promised he wouldn’t be taking your guns. Read it again. And weep for the millions of Americans who haven’t yet woken up to his deliberate deceptions, his mind tricks. Who hear one thing when another thing is what was actually said, deceptively.
It’s like this old argument between a couple:
Her: “You don’t love me any more!”
Him, face expressing shock: “How can you possibly say that?” (His face goes all hurt) “How can you POSSIBLY SAY THAT?”
He didn’t say, “Of course I love you, now and forever more.” You just *thought* that’s what he said. Ooops.
Mike, that is precisely how Obama argues and uses straw men. And frankly, that’s an intuitive approach to the truth (or lack thereof).
Yesterday, DQ and I spent part of our lunch time discussing an opposing counsel we know. Both of us were impressed by his innate tactical skills. He has an intuitive grasp of how to position himself on any given matter, how to release information in a slow fashion, etc. It can’t be learned. Very few lawyers have this skill. As I said to DQ, similar to Rummy’s “unknown unknowns,” it wouldn’t even occur to me to think about the tactical decisions he makes as a matter of course. What this means is that he’s a very effective lawyer. He’s chosen a career that meshes perfectly with his own instincts.
Obama, clearly, has chosen a career — dishonest politician — that also meshes perfectly with his own instincts.
Good discussion, Bookworm and Mike Devx. One possible venue where Mr. Obama may have learned (or at least observed) rhetorical skills is in church, at the feet of Jeremiah Wright. An email acquaintance of mine used to post (prior to summer 2008) how the most effective preacher he’d ever observed was Wright—and he was very, very complementary.
OTOH, he never mentioned what the *message* was, and people began to comment on that gap to him. I honestly do not think that this gent (who is Anglo, by the way) ever intellectually heard the racist message of Wright–at least not until last summer, when it all came out.
A secondary venue where Mr. Obama was able to practice his skills was in the classroom. I’ve read from some former students (not all Obama supporters) that he was quite effective there.
When coupled with his innate abilities–his “instincts”, as Bookworm puts it–he makes for a powerful political force. We should not forget: demagogues are dangerous.
Hah. I knew there had to be at least one. I only picked a link on page one.
http://www.excellentbooks.com/newtitles.html
Now the scary thing about this is that this is being published by a text book publishing company. To be honest, I didn’t search the site to see if speeches by Bush were available – I saw write-up for Lincoln speeches – but it does make you go “Hmmmmm”….
History teaches us that charismatic demagogues and fascist Utopian visions can only guarantee Hell on Earth. Unfortunately, these narcissists don’t bother to read history and worse, believe the can actually remake history to fit their own rhetoric.
Further proof that even when he doesn’t use the strawman approach, you can’t trust him…
http://furtheradventuresofindigored.blogspot.com/2009/03/incredible-shrinking-obama.html
He will occasionally go wild and check out the WaPo or LA Times.
If that is the case, what would happen if he started reading what I write, Book?
I say this not to denigrate LBJ, but to praise him.
Heh, that sounds amazingly like Shakespear. “I came to bury Caesar, not praise him”.
(something I accept academically, because neither his rhetoric nor arguments resonate with me)
You must have full redundancies for your mental defense book ; )
It appears he learned his rhetorical sleights of hand elsewhere.
Try Ayers and Alinsky.
NOTHING could be further from the truth. Nothing
Correct. It would be the day after tomorrow. Or the day after that.
Btw, I wouldn’t call that the strawman approach, although it uses the same logical fallacy. It highlights an extemporaneous and weak argument and then counters it, and then acting like this was a great victory. But the result is what matters. And the result is more in line with misdirection and deception than pure logic. After all, the logic is not being parsed. It is not what is being used to manipulate. The only people that see the logic would be us, the audience he is not targeting because he knows it won’t work on us.
Like Rush said, it doesn’t matter how you convince people, whether you made them think it was their idea all along or not. Obama makes everybody feel good because everybody thinks he said something that he really didn’t. Obama has invited them into one grand delusion, and such things will always end in a Jonestown or two.
Link is to a cartoon. You might want to consider printing it out and posting it on your refrigerator. No further comment necessary…but it _might_ provoke a bit of discussion! Or not….
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2201466/posts