It was Inauguration Day, January 20th, 2009, and after years of anticipation and preparation, President-elect Barack Hussein Obama hit the ground stumbling. Things began going downhill even as Barack took his oath of office. It was then that Chief Justice John Roberts blenderized the words of the United States Constitution, which caused Mr. Obama to begin babbling as he struggled to follow Justice Roberts’ novel rendition of the oath.
Apparently Justice Roberts chose to “improve” upon the prose of the Founding Fathers by re-organizing their words to conform to the lawyer-speak demanded by various law-review style manuals, which discourage the splitting of verbs. Justice Roberts just knew that the words “will faithfully execute the Office of President” must be shuffled and re-delt so that the word “faithfully” trailed behind the words “will execute” in a stupid effort to make the English language conform to the rules of Latin grammar, which don’t allow the splitting of verbs.
The following day, the two guys who hadn’t thought to rehearse the oath together met again in the White House Map Room at 7:30 p.m. for a do-over that was kept top secret until it had been completed successfully.
“Are you ready to take the oath?” Chief Justice Roberts had asked.
“I am,” Mr. Obama replied. “And we’re going to do it very slowly.” (NY Times, 1/22/09)
Other than the make-over duo, the only people in the room were four aides, four reporters and a White House photographer. “Mr. Obama raised his right hand and did not use a Bible,” the Times reported.
“Congratulations again,” said Mr. Roberts after a proper recitation.
“Only hours after aides told reporters there was no reason to administer the oath again,” the Times reported, “They concluded it was easier to do it on the first day, rather than have someone challenge the legitimacy of his presidency.”
Really? And where was this abundance of caution when Barack Obama was asked to present some evidence that he is, in fact, a “natural born” citizen of the United States, as the Constitution requires? Despite repeated requests, the only evidence Barack Obama has grudgingly offered that he might have been a legitimate candidate for the presidency is one laser-printer-generated “proof of live birth” that is decades younger than he is. It’s junk. He sent that to the super-left-wing Daily KOS blogsite where it was showcased like the Shroud of Turin, even though it was only evidence that Obama could not produce any genuine proof of his legitimacy.
Earlier that same day, Vice President Joe Biden had arrived to administer oaths of office to new staffers. It was then that he popped off with a wisecrack about needing to read from a written text because his memory was not as sharp as that of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. A hovering Barack Obama nudged Mr. Biden as a signal to cork the poison. Biden later phoned an apology to the chief justice.
Always eager for another photo op, Joe Biden trotted over to the State Department to once again administer an oath of office to Hillary Clinton, who had already been sworn in, only moments after her confirmation the previous month. There was laughter all around as off-camera voices cautioned Biden not to muff the oath. When calm was restored, Joe Biden began reading from his prepared text . . . and tripped over his own words. As one wag put it, “You can put lipstick on an idiot . . .”
Mr. Obama’s choice for Vice President has a long history of misusing the English language, one so ugly that it doomed his 1988 presidential aspirations. While attending Syracuse University Law School, Joe Biden was brought up on charges of plagiarism, a danger signal that he is not an original thinker. In 1987, the New York Times reported that, “According to the people familiar with the record of the 44-year-old senator from Delaware, he was called before the disciplinary body at the law school . . . An academic official said Mr. Biden had been found guilty, ‘threw himself on the mercy of the board’ and promised not to repeat the offense. This, according to the official, persuaded the board to drop the matter and allow Mr. Biden to remain in law school . . .”
Joe’s promises mean nothing. In 1987 he was caught plagiarizing a speech by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock, almost word for word. Biden even tried to steal the man’s life history: Neil Kinnock had recalled his ancestors who had played football after working long days down in the mines, who had recited poetry and whose toil had paved the way for him to become the first of his family to attend college.
The sneaky Joe Biden delivered all of these details in a campaign speech he gave in Iowa in August of 1987. Only a few words were changed. Never mind that Biden’s daddy was a used car salesman, his granddaddy had been a mining engineer. Biden never credited Neil Kinnock; he told Iowans that he had recalled all of these personal details on his way to the rally. When confronted with the truth, Joe Biden responded lamely that he had “assumed” that some of his relatives had once worked in a mine. He sounded even dumber than Al Gore who never tired of telling how his daddy had toiled long hours in a mill, but never quite got around to mentioning that his daddy was a mill manager. Oops! Barack Obama knew all about Joe Biden’s trashy past when he asked this chronic phony to be his Vice President.
Joe Biden is right at home in the Obama administration along side a boss who stole his infamous “Just words!” speech from the text of Deval Patrick’s October 15th, 2006 Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign oration. When that theft was exposed, Hillary’s campaign communications director, Howard Wolfson, observed that, “Senator Obama is running on the strength of his promises and, as we have seen in the last couple of days, he’s breaking his promises and his rhetoric isn’t his own.”
Promises & Rhetoric
“As a candidate,” the Wall Street Journal reminds us, “Mr. Obama was able to promise all things to all people, and position papers still posted on his campaign Web site detail hundreds of pledges made. The Web site PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times, counts 510 promises and is tracking action on each.” (WSJ, 1/20/09, p.A3)
“There are interest groups that care about every one of them,” White House Chief of Staff Rham Emanuel assured us. (Hang onto your wallet.)
As for his rhetoric, Barack Obama’s reputation as a wordsmith is anchored entirely by his style of speaking; it owes little to his intellect. Indeed, Obama’s most memorable rhetorical flourishes were stolen from more trenchant minds than his own. Computer and literary analyses of both of Obama’s memoirs strongly indicate that they were written by two very different intellects and that Dreams from My Father was not written by Mr. Obama. Recall that as the presidential campaign season was drawing to a close, Mr. Obama’s handlers were so fearful that he might sink his own campaign by speaking his own mind without the crutch of a written text that they insisted he read from a teleprompter device, even when speaking in tiny venues, such as rural high school gymnasiums.
Obama wrapped up his campaign with a whistle stop tour headed for Washington, D.C. In Philadelphia he gave a speech that was crammed with pretty rhetoric which millions of Obama’s poorly educated followers mistook for his own. As usual, he offered no attributions.
When Obama spoke of “fierce urgency” he was sponging from an August 1963 speech by Martin Luther King Jr. When Obama spoke of “sacred honor” and “ideals that continue to light the world” he was blenderizing locutions lifted from the Declaration of Independence and JFK’s 1961 inaugural address. After that, Obama stitched together words from the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to produce this pretty, but unoriginal, passage:
“That our rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness come not from our laws, but from our maker. And that a government of, by and for the people can endure.”
When Obama made reference to “our better angels” he was exploiting words pilfered from Lincoln’s first inaugural address of March 1861. Barack’s suggestion of how “we might perfect our union” poaches from the U.S. Constitution. When Barack spoke about the American Revolution being a continuing struggle “in the minds and hearts of the people” he was padding his speech with words lifted whole-cloth from an 1818 letter written by John Adams.
Thanks to undemanding minority parents and our under-performing teachers’ unions, illiteracy among urban blacks is now as low as 33% in many American cities. In our capital city, testing has pegged the black illiteracy rate at fifty percent. One of every two blacks in Washington, D.C. can’t make any sense of a newspaper, a bus schedule or a pay stub. This means that Barack Obama’s most enthusiastic fans have no clue that he is an unimaginative and formulaic thinker or that his pretty orations are Doctor-Frankenstein inspired monstrosities stitched together from bits of other men’s words and ideas.
Obama Comforts the Autocrats
During the first moments of his administration, Barack Obama sent a clear signal to the autocratic oppressors of the Middle East that they had nothing to fear from President Obama. He was so eager to send this message that he beamed it out during his inaugural address: “To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” By “new way forward” he meant a return to the old pre-George W. Bush way that had allowed the Arab autocrats to sleep soundly.
Only days later, Barack Obama was making his first big television address, not to Americans, but to the audience of Al-Arabiya television. There he sat, looking intense and earnestly assuring every Arab dictator that all President Obama wanted was to return to“the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.”
George W. had given the Arab despots six years of insomnia; he had scattered the Taliban; he had pounded the snot out of Saddam Hussein’s murder machine; he had convinced a Libyan dictator to quit the terrorism game by blowing up the arrogant jerk’s house with a smart bomb. The Syrians made tracks out of Lebanon because they got a hint of what Dubbya had in store for them.
As a conservative, I have no enthusiasm for tedious and expensive exercises in foreign-nation building, but that doesn’t mean that such efforts can’t succeed. It should be noted that George W. was never a classic conservative. The preposterously misnamed “neo-conservatives” who massaged his foreign policies into shape were mostly former liberals who had been seduced by the do-some-good potential of American military power. They were international welfare workers on steroids.
Nonetheless, of the 29 democratic nations that existed in 1970, fifteen of them had been midwifed by foreign powers or had come into being immediately after the departure of a foreign occupying power whose cultural ideals still lingered. Fledgling liberty may need the protection of a greater power. The muscular diplomacy of George W. Bush gave encouragement to the dissidents of Iran even as his business-as-usual relations with the Saudi princes stoked the resentments of oppressed Saudi citizens. President Obama has signaled every Middle East oppressor that there is nothing to fear from an Obama administration.
The lingering vision of Saddam Hussein being flushed from his spider hole and then being called to account and then being hanged gave the thuggish Arab potentates the heebie-jeebies. Imagine their relief now that Barack Obama has rushed to a microphone and broadcast to the entire Muslim world that he wants nothing more than to turn the clock back thirty years to that idyllic time before the troublesome Mr. Bush began fretting about human rights and the importance of actually enforcing U.N. resolutions.
Mr. Obama’s unseemly rush to assure the Arab despots that he is no threat to them or their homicidal master plans, only made him look weak and inexperienced. Why not keep these goons guessing and off balance? Now these thugs know he’s a punk – they know they’ve got Obama in their pocket. By an ironic twist the stiff Mr. Bush, who had nurtured the hope of emancipation in the Muslim lands, has been succeeded by the limber, smooth and cool Mr. Obama – a guy whose biography is all balled up with Kenya and Indonesia and Islam – who now sends a message to the little people of the Muslim lands that American power will no longer nurture their longing for liberty. On that count, they can abandon all hope.
Hope & Hypocrisy
Back in January of 2005 a snarky Anne E. Kornblut expressed the temper of the New York Times with a nasty slap at First Lady Laura Bush. Beneath the bold-face title Laura Bush Defends Gala in Time of War and Disaster, Ms.Kornblut opined:
“With less than a week to go until her husband’s second inauguration, Laura Bush on Friday defended the decision to hold the $40 million celebration as planned despite a war abroad and the tsunami disaster in the Indian Ocean.”
The New York Times would have preferred that President Bush cancel all inaugural ceremonies or at least tone them way down. Democrats such as Anthony Weiner, (D-NY) and Jim McDermott, (D-Wash) called on Mr. Bush to show less pomp and be lots more humble.
Hadn’t President Woodrow Wilson scrubbed all parties from his 1917 inaugural; hadn’t the stupendously wonderful President Franklin Roosevelt celebrated his 1945 inauguration at the White House with a short speech, cold chicken sandwiches and a plain pound cake, as Democrat representatives reminded Mr. Bush in a scolding letter.
Mr. Bush had been given forty million dollars by friends and well wishers to pay for his inaugural festivities and the left-wingers at the New York Times were in high dudgeon that Mr. Bush wasn’t going to spend every penny of it on sack cloth and ashes.
The fulminating liberals at the New York Times castigated President Bush in a January 11th 2005 editorial under the bold head Victor’s Spoils. I have added italics to highlight their snippy schoolmarmish tone.
“At the rate President Bush’s supporters are giving money, his second inauguration threatens to stand out in the history books like the common folks’ muddy boot prints on the White House furniture at Andrew Jackson’s gala. The $40 million record for inaugural partying set four years ago for Mr. Bush is expected to be shattered this month . . . Ordinary citizens might have hoped that the overriding issue in Washington – the perilous Iraq war, with its drain on the nation’s blood and treasure – would dictate restraint. But plans for the four-day extravaganza roll forward with nine celebratory balls being underwritten by the usual corporate and fat-cat supplicants in the political power mill. There’s nothing new in Washington’s triumphalist celebrations, festooned with price tags for access, but war usually mutes the singing and dancing. Not this year.
Five days later, Times reporter John Tierney was right in there twisting the knife:
“Inaugurations are always balancing acts: part coronation, part celebration of democracy, part touchdown dance in the end zone. But they become even trickier during times of war, particularly when television images of dancers in black tie can be instantly juxtaposed with soldiers in body armor . . .” [Italics added]
He goes on about “some critics” who think the forty million should have been “sent to the troops in Iraq.” Not surprisingly, all these “critics” are later identified as Democrat Party partisans.
Only one presidential term later, in January 2009, our country was still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the American economy was in a frightening meltdown. But suddenly the tone of the liberals had undergone a complete reversal. The triumphalist liberals were suddenly eager to splurge a record-breaking forty-five million dollars of privately donated money on even more extravagant inaugural balls and more of them. And then there were the security concerns: Obama was a black president-elect who needed special care. Hadn’t Michelle Obama declared America to be a “downright mean country”? And then there would be the four to five million celebrants whom the Obama enthusiasts predicted would swarm over our capital city. All this worry drove the cost of Obama’s inaugural bash up to an historic $150 million, most of it billed to the American tax slaves.
There was not a single scolding editorial from the New York Times. To the contrary, the Times printed full-page spreads hawking its own line of Obama commemorative merchandise. There were no snotty commentaries from the Times about how Obama’s lavish festival “threatened” to stand out in the history books, or how Obama’s forty-five million-dollar party purse “shattered” all previous expenditures. They didn’t belittle Obama’s extravaganza as a “triumphalist celebration.” They were careful to not disparage the big-money “bundlers” who bankrolled Obama’s Big Night as “fat-cat supplicants in the political power mill.” To the contrary, the New York Times glamorized Obama’s bagmen as totally cool, hip and with-it smart guys who were in for the ride of their lives on party night, which was their just reward for being ever so cool and with-it and smart. They were liberals after all.
To encourage future bagmen to bankroll future Obama partyfests, the New York Times glowingly showcased big-bucks bundler Chris Sacca, the San Francisco investor who “bought himself entrée to perhaps the most elite party within a party in inaugural history.”
For the folks who greased Barack Obama, it would be a memorable evening. As the New York Times enthused:
“Its itinerary is jam-packed, including not just reserved seats up close to all the public events but also a string of private events open only to big fund-raisers. There are Saturday and Sunday night parties with surprise celebrity entertainment; a “Gospel brunch” Sunday with Yolanda Adams, Carole King and Bebe Winans; a breakfast policy briefing Monday with a cabinet nominee; black tie dinners serenaded by singers including Faith Hill and Patti LaBelle; even a chance to watch the inaugural parade from the comfort of a Pennsylvania Avenue restaurant.
Clearly the Times had no intention of ever juxtaposing images of any of these Obama black-tie attendees with images of soldiers in body armor. Without a hint of embarrassment, the New York Times quoted the gushing Obama bagman, Chris Sacca:
“I think this inauguration is going to be bigger than anything that has happened before – just the scale, the excitement. And they have four days of events scheduled for us at all levels and varieties of donors, so we are going to have a good four days, I am sure.”
The New York Times was so bedazzled by the goodies being lavished on Obama’s money men that it just couldn’t contain its excitement:
“The inaugural committee’s events are hardly the only way, of course, for high rollers to have fun while in town. Some fund-raisers say they plan to slip out for The Huffington Post’s celebrity-packed pre-inaugural ball Monday, with performances by Sting, Sheryl Crow and Will.i.am, for example, or for the Creative Coalition’s $5,000-a-seat party Tuesday, with entertainment by Elvis Costello, Sam Moore and Sting (who is having a busy week.)
Though the New York Times has spilled an ocean of ink likening Barack Obama to Franklin Roosevelt, they drew the line at suggesting that Mr. Obama keep his speech brief and serve only cold chicken sandwiches and plain pound cake to his camp followers. To the contrary, the Times couldn’t resist an opportunity to make George Bush look small by comparison: “The biggest treat for top donors to President Bush’s inaugurations, for example, was a few songs performed by Andrea Bocelli in 2005,” smirked the “newspaper of record.” (1/15/09)
The Missing Millions
The titanic crowds never materialized. Though the low-angle photos published in the New York Times gave the false impression of an unbroken sea of humanity on the National Mall, photographs taken from above revealed yawning gaps in the crowd. For the most part, the crowd was composed of seven widely-spaced dense clusters gathered in front of seven viewing screens – one each at the Lincoln Memorial, at 17th Street, at the Washington Monument, at three widely-spaced mobile Jumbotrons and an area from the Capitol to Fourth Street that was reserved for ticket holders. Most of the remainder were gathered outside the security barriers; they were refused admittance. The best headcount was done by IHS Jane’s, which estimated the crowd size at 1.3 million to 1.6 million, based on measured crown densities of 0.1 to 5 people per square meter. The high-end figure of 1.6 million is a mere 40% of the four million people that the liberal pundits had predicted.
If you don’t believe Jane’s, then listen to Conrad Harrell; he’s the vice president of Don’s Johns, the company that provided most of the portable toilets for Barack’s outdoor shindig. In the porta-pottie subculture the Obama inauguration had been billed as “the largest temporary toilet event in the history of the United States.” But it was not to be. Mr. Harrell reported that most portables were only a quarter full on Wednesday morning – not half full, as they are after most events. Adam Carter, the operations manager of Alpine Portable Restrooms, discovered “whole rolls of unused toilet paper in some.”
As it turned out, the smaller-than-anticipated crowd was not the only reason the porta-potties went unused. It seems that the sort of human who would be drawn to an Obama event is a different sort of human altogether:
“At an event like this, you really have to wear Depends,” said Karen Johnson of Fredericksburg, Va., who isn’t a fan of portable toilets. “It’s so nasty inside those things,” she said.
“William Broker, grocery manager at the Giant supermarket in Bethesda, Md., said he’s noticed that sales of Depend, a common brand of adult diaper, rose 20 percent in the days leading up to Tuesday. Several couples told him they were getting them to survive the dense mall crowd.
The Neilsen Company, which tallies television viewership, estimated that 37.8 million people tuned in the Obama inauguration. It’s an impressive number, far more than the 29.7 million Americans who took a peek at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration in 1993, but way behind the 41.8 million Americans who gathered to watch Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981. At first glance it looks like a mere 4 million difference, but that doesn’t take into account how much our population has increased in almost three decades, from 229,465,714 to 303,824,646 citizens. In 1981, Mr. Reagan’s inauguration was viewed by 18.22% of the American population; in 2009, Mr. Obama’s oath taking was witnessed by only 12.44% of Americans – almost 50 % more Americans cared to witness Mr. Reagan’s inauguration.
Not to worry, the Obamas looked darling in their custom-crafted duds. Beneath the headline “Obama coat tales boost J. Crew’s cachet” the New York Times got all warm dewy-eyed about how “Barack Obama dared to wear a white bow tie, custom-made by the retailer, with a short jacket instead of a traditional tailcoat.” They made no mention of the bullet-resistant garment he was wearing under his designer rags. Seeing the guy all bundled up was a welcome change from all those tabloid cover shots of him flashing his hairy man breasts to photographers on beach after beach.
The Times was eager to know how J.Crew snagged the Obama inauguration gig. Jena Lyons, a J.Crew “creative director” spilled:
“Basically we had gotten an e-mail from someone in (Michelle Obama’s) camp who said, ‘Can you call me?’ It was cryptic. I called this person back, and she said, ‘I’m doing this stuff for the Obamas, and this is what I want.’ And ‘Can you do more.’ We did more. We pushed the button around the 18th of December to make everything.”
Everyone was happy, except the throng of Obama imitators who mobbed the J.Crew website only to be told that those cute Michelle O knockoffs won’t be available for eight more months. But the boost in sales will be greatly appreciated by the throng of Chinese factory workers who stitch this stuff together. At least Michelle Obama finally stopped wearing all those echo-of-Jackie-Kennedy outfits.
And the Band Played On
Before all the fashion poses and Barack’s bungled oath taking, viewers were subjected to a painful, somber, performance by Yo-yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and two other guys, all of whom were faking it while pre-recorded music was pumped out over loud speakers to the Obama fans on the Mall. But hey, hadn’t the great Luciano Pavarotti gotten caught lip-synching during a performance in Modena, Italy; hadn’t Ashlee Simpson faked it on Saturday Night Live? Hadn’t the Chinese substituted a pretty child who pretended to sing sweetly at the Olympic ceremony? If it’s good enough for a Milli Vanilli concert, then faking it is certainly good enough for the bumbling Barack Obama, a hustler who’s been faking it since Occidental College.
After the pre-recorded music had died away and the twenty somethings had slipped out of their wet diapers and the sun had set, it was time for the high-roller revelers to being partying – despite two continuing wars and a collapsing economy. They had done their jobs well. Barack Obama enjoyed more than twice the purchasing power of his rival. He had the power to purchase the presidency.
Within days, the impetuous Mr. Obama would sign into law a potentially ruinous spending bill that would lavish almost a trillion dollars on projects of questionable worth and burden future generations with onerous debt. He signed it without reading it.
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2009
February 2, 2009