Mark Steyn is at it again at NRO. I wish I had written these three paragraphs… snarling and with one classical reference and a borrowed Norse legend reference (for you Lars!):
“Steering those currents”? How could even a member of the president’s insulated, self-regarding speechwriting team be so tin-eared as to write that line? How could the president be so tone-deaf as to deliver it in May of 2010? Hey, genius, if you’re so damn good at “steering currents,” why not try doing it in the Gulf of Mexico?
As for many great “thinkers,” for Barack Obama and his coterie words seem to exist mostly in the realm of metaphor rather than as descriptors of actual action actually occurring in anything so humdrum as reality. And so it is that, even as his bungling administration flounders in the turbulent waters of the Gulf, on the speaker’s podium the president still confidently sails forth deftly steering the ship through the narrow ribbon of sludge between the Scylla of sonorous banality and the Charybdis of gaseous uplift.
Two years ago this week, then-Senator Obama declared that his very nomination as Democratic-party presidential candidate (never mind his election, or inauguration) marked the moment when “our planet began to heal” and “the rise of the oceans began to slow.” “Well, when you anoint yourself King Canute,” remarked Charles Krauthammer the other day, “you mustn’t be surprised when your subjects expect you to command the tides.”
Go read the whole thing. It’s aptly called “King Barack the Verbose”.
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They called Mao Zedong “The Great Helmsman”
Thanks for the hat tip. For the record, the original story of King Canute did not say that he arrogantly tried to make the sea waves fall back at his command. The original story has him ordering his men (he was a Dane who became king of England, for the record) to carry his throne to the water’s edge, where he then solemnly commanded the waves to go back. When the waves instead wet his feet, he told his courtiers to stop flattering him about his power; he obviously wasn’t the omnipotent potentate they liked to tell him he was. The man had a very Viking sensibility.
Steyn’s great. I love when he participates in the Ricochet podcasts.
BHO may be able
in his own mindto command the sea driven waves, but he sure can’t command the sea driven BP oil that’s flowing free thanks directly to the liberal bending over at the waist to the tree huggers disdain for the sight of oil wells off the shallower, oil rich coasts of the Atlantic and Pacific!Sorry about that long sentence, but, afterall, I am German, and we love long words and sentences.
Heh,
That reminds me of the scene in Henry IV, part II, where Hotspur is dining with Owen Glendower, and they get into a pissing match. Glendower chastises Hotspur by saying “Why, I can call monsters from the vasty deep!”
Hotspur replies, “Why, so can I, or any other man! But tell me, Glendower, do the monsters come when you call them?”
Obama and his sycophants need to just stfd & stfu. That whole crew is a national embarrassment.
” That whole crew is a national embarrassment.”
In spades!
“Spades”! Fritz,I’m tellin’!!