To amuse you while I'm gone.
Heading back into the cold country for another spell, so I will leave you with a great cartoon.
IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED: Protect Your Privacy Rights
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This is a critical moment for our constitutional rights, as the House of
Representatives is poised to vote imminently on the reauthorization of
Section 702...
1 week ago
For claiming to be so real world oriented, you need a reality check. I've been scanning and scanning your archives and I just can't seem to find all the equivalent mockery of the last president who you may remember was a fucking illiterate.
ReplyDeleteWhen giving a speech, Barack Obama uses a teleprompter just like every other live televised major public speaker on Earth. When 2 billion people with all their respective biases are going to analyze your every word you need to speak carefully. I suppose you think Bush spoke his heart to his adoring public? Of course he used one too, on the very rare occasions when they allowed him to speak live. The difference is he wasn't bright enough to use it correctly, so his handlers played up the off-the-cuff smirk asides to make him appear 'down to earth'.
But mainly they just skipped the concept altogether. The Bush era press was excluded from the white house, and so was the public. If you want to honestly assess Obama's orational abilities (which you don't, right?) why not analyze the most difficult trick of all, press conferences and their unscripted dialogues. In the Bush era, they were as sanitized as could be, straight out of a dictatorship. No hard questions, no unsympathetic reporters even granted admission, they were a farce of democracy.
Obama's are in another class entirely, intelligent, professional and open. Of course, criticize his policies if you disagree, preferably logically, (your support of Palin suggests a lack in that area) but his speaking style? Have you actually watched a Bush press conference?
You obviously mean something like this:
ReplyDeleteFrom the Editorial, “The Australian” 22 06 09 :
And yet, unremarkable as these facts are to anyone with eyes to see, over the past week we've seen a line of clever souls -- from celebrity statisticians to Bush-hating former CIA officers to the President of the US himself -- queue up to suggest to us, using one species of pseudo-scepticism or another, that we don't really know what happened in the Iranian elections, or that we shouldn't really know what to think about them, or, even if we do, that we should know better than to say this out loud.
And then, following in their wake, there have been the apologists: such as the people who pretend (with outraged expressions on their faces) that Barack Obama is actually "calibrating" his responses in order to protect the lives of the demonstrators. Yet Obama's own advisers freely acknowledged to The New York Times last Friday that his prime concern is for his new personal diplomatic initiative for the region. This initiative -- replete with the customary vague, conciliatory speeches and zen-like media performances -- has been inconvenienced by the events in Tehran. And, ice-veined pragmatist that he is, he's disinclined to be thrown off his grand course of regional conciliation by a few drops of blood on some dusty foreign street.
Bush was better than this.
Jack, calm down. Those veins sticking out of your neck are going to pop some balloons. I know it's hard for you to accept but the fact is is that Obama is vulnerable to the same mistakes that Bush was, hence the reason they make him use the teleprompter so much. He doesn't want to be the butt of jokes from talk show comedians such as Letterman and Leno like Bush was because they know that it would hurt is public standing (a la Bush). How do I know this?
ReplyDeleteObserve,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjO8Qc5s1fY
See? That's what can happen when he goes around without his teleprompters!
Of course I would expect errors from Obama. He's human, and like I said, his every word is analyzed by the entire world.
ReplyDeleteTo suggest because he has made a couple of speaking errors that he is incapable of intelligent and meaningful speech is disingenous and betrays bias.
And to suggest that he isn't light years ahead of Bush is a joke. His term(s?) will be much, much better for our country, and he's basically just what we needed. Notice I said 'our' and 'we'. I don't know anything about Australian politics so you won't catch me braodcasting my opinion about it for every wannabe pundit with a mouse to argue/agree with. I could go and read some sites and form an opinion mighty quick of course, but that would most likely be an opinion worth very, very little.
All you folks know about US politics is what you read on your most likely already biased websites, so you should consider the fact that yours is worth the same. Come and sit with some of my intelligent and progressive American friends over a beer or 3 in a local bar in NYC and you may just find yourself at a loss to explain your political theories.
g'day